There was a guy on SomethingAwful who claimed to be a special forces veteran that served in Iraq and he was actually believable to the people he talked to (he posted on the gun and military boards full of actual veterans) until he brought up the fact he preferred to use revolvers as his main side-arm into semi-autos which immediately raised enough BS flags that people investigated him and found out he was lying about the whole thing.
He used the “mechanical simplicity and reliability” argument to as the reason why he used one but apparently to actual veterans you always choose capacity every single time if you’re serious about combat.
I own about a dozen pistols, and only one is a revolver. I bought it more for looks than function. Its a single action 45LC. I purchased a nice cowboy rig for it and everything.
Yes, these are the same thing. It’s a device that holds the right number of rounds in the right orientation to quickly slide into a revolver’s cylinder.
Several reasons. Charge strength is one - a weak cartridge like a snake load won’t reliably cycle a semi-auto. A second reason relates to the first - I can run .38 as well as .357 in my Model 28. Different length rounds. A third reason is that many semis are mighty picky about what they eat, and varying their diet in a single magazine can lead to all sorts of jams and stoppages.
hi Theres no reason to use a weapon to subdue innocent people . If you want to negotiate then I suppose thats the sa-me thing that going to work everyday and talking to clients is .
Somebody might be able to find a better cite but if you look at Wikipedia for some of the most powerful handgun cartridges, you will see that the guns offered in those cartridges are all revolvers or single-shots.
The .50 Action Express (.50 Action Express - Wikipedia) is a high-power cartridge designed for auto-pistols but some of the cartridges above generate 25-50% more energy.
To return to the OP, it is easy to get revolvers to work with blanks for the movies. Getting semi-automatics to work takes more modification to get them to work reliably.
AFAIK either there’s no true automatic ‘pistol’ firing a cartridge more powerful than .50 AE.
And the best known .50 AE automatic, the Desert Eagle, is gas operated with a mechanism somewhat similar to the M16’s. It illustrates an additional design challenge of automatics firing very powerful cartridges: the simplest recoil or blow back mechanisms used with low power cartridges might be less practical, enhancing the revolver’s simplicity advantage.
OTOH an advantage for automatics I didn’t see mentioned is so called ‘felt recoil’. The total recoil energy is a function of the cartridge, per Newton, not the type of gun. However the shooter’s perception, and effect on accuracy, can be significantly altered by where the energy goes and how fast. The advantage of the automatic is that the compression of the mechanism spring spreads out the recoil energy over time, whereas it all hits the shooter’s hand at once with a revolver. It’s subject to many other variables, including the weight of the gun, shape and padding of the hand grip etc. And it’s a more marginal factor for low powered pistol cartridges. But it’s an advantage all else equal for a gun like the Desert Eagle (which also has a muzzle brake to reduce felt recoil, though so do some big revolvers).
I carry my S&W .44 mag when I’m working in bear country. I work in bad weather, lots of rain and snow. Depending on the job there are a variety of living condition, some better then others. I like the .44 because it’s easy to get clean and dry at the end of a long day.
An off-the-shelf automatic or semi-automatic weapon usually won’t cycle correctly with a blank, so to solve this they use what is called a blank firing adapter. For weapons that use recoil to cycle, they put a blowback mechanism in the barrel that restricts the gases and forces them back to provide more recoil. For gas operated weapons, they use a somewhat similar method of restricting the barrel to produce higher gas pressures to make the weapon cycle.
These are so common in Hollywood that the director doesn’t need to worry about it, and can select the gun based on the script requirements or whatever look they are going after. If the director wants a revolver, they can get a blank-firing revolver very easily. If they want a semi-auto, they can get a blank-firing semi-auto just as easily.
Yep. We modified a Beretta 92FS for use in a film. The barrel had to be plugged with a set screw in the breech, and a hole had to be drilled through the set screw. The hole had to be just the right size to provide enough back-pressure for the pistol to cycle, but not so small it exerted too much pressure on pistol. The ears on the locking lug had to be ground off as well. To use the pistol for live ammo, you’d have to replace the barrel and locking lug. Somewhere in my storage unit I think I still have a couple of M-16 ‘Hollywood-style’ blank firing adapters. These are little plugs (with a hole in them) that fit between the end of the barrel and the flash hider. That’s a much easier conversion that requires no actual modification.
When Robert Rodriguez made El Mariachi, he borrowed submachine-guns from the Mexican police. Since these could not be modified to fire blanks, he used editing and sound effects to make it appear they were fully functional, instead of having to manually reload after each round.
ETA:
This is true. Our film, and Rodriguez’s film, were ultra-low budget. When you don’t have a budget, or live outside of major filmmaking areas, it can be difficult to get what you want. In that case, you make your own (as we did), be creative (as Rodriguez did), or use a revolver.
A quick aside here, I’m curious: what do Hollywood style BFAs look like? I know the ones we used when I was in the Marines, 80s and 90s, were bright red almost cubes, maybe about 1 to 1.5 inches on an edge, with a silver metal hand screw to screw the plug into the muzzle. The red box locked onto the back of the flash suppressor.
Right. The ‘red box’ made it pretty clear the barrel was blocked, and any soldier/marine could take it off without tools. The ‘Hollywood-style’ BFAs are made so that the blank-firing rifle cannot be distinguished from one with live ammunition (for obvious reasons).
