In a prior article, I talked about the misconceptions that people have about firearms and shooting because of the entertainment industry’s lack of knowledge and misrepresentation of the truth. That article dealt primarily with the depiction of the grip. The response was such that I thought I would address other firearm myths that Hollywood perpetrates. Those of us who shoot are aware that due to the Motion Picture industry and other popular media, firearm myths abound. I will now attempt to address some of the most outlandish in no particular order.
Plastic Fantastic
The first one I will address is that “Plastic” guns can not be detected by airport security equipment. This myth was most likely created by the movie, “Die Hard 2: Die Harder,” starring Bruce Willis. In that movie, Willis’ character makes a reference to a mythical Glock 7 pistol, which he states is “a porcelain gun made in Germany that cost more than a month’s salary and is undetectable by metal detectors.” Here is the truth concerning that.
Glock never made a model 7, its first pistol was the model 17 and Glocks were made in Austria, not Germany. While it is true that a Glock has a fair amount of polymer in its frame, it is a dense material that is visible to X-rays. Also, 85% of the Glock is still made of steel. This is true for any polymer-framed pistol as well, not just Glocks. There’s no such thing as a gun that is invisible to metal detectors.
Kaboom!
The next one we have all seen examples of is that you can make anything explode just by shooting it. Once again, we have all seen the hero shoot at a car’s gas tank and it promptly explodes into a huge ball of flame. Or the hero shoots at an oxygen tank embedded in a shark’s mouth and it promptly blows the great fish to smithereens, etc., etc. The truth is, if cars exploded into huge fireballs with every tiny puncture or sudden impact, every automobile manufacturer would have been buried in lawsuits years ago.
To get a gas tank to blow up by shooting it, you need to light a fire outside the tank to vaporize the gas inside it to the point that the tank over-pressurizes. Then, you would have to shoot it with a special incendiary bullet. Ordinary copper or steel-jacketed bullets just don’t produce enough sparks to set anything on fire reliably.
There exists the extreme possibility that a steel-jacketed bullet may produce enough sparks to start a fire, but this is not a reliable method of ignition. Special incendiary bullets have been developed for specialized applications, but they are not commonly available outside the military.
Travel Reservations?
Another one of my favorites is when someone gets shot with a pistol and flies backwards 20 feet through the air and crashes through a plate glass window on his way to the middle of the street. It’s always impressive but impossible. A bullet fired from a handheld firearm does not have enough kinetic energy to knock someone over let alone propel them through the air. That goes along with another unbelievable favorite where it appears that bullets cannot penetrate car doors. There are always running gun battles in movies where cars get riddled with gunfire and no one is hit or injured and it’s always in amazing style.
The truth is, even small caliber projectiles fired from a handgun will penetrate a single car door, provided they don’t hit the steel support beams of the car. Rifles and shotgun slugs will easily penetrate clear through the body of the car, come out the other side, and keep going. But somehow no one gets hit when machine guns riddle their vehicle at close range…
Unlimited Ammo? Sign Me Up!
I’m sure you have all questioned this next one. Machine guns that have unlimited amounts of ammo and never need to be reloaded. Watch any action movie where people carry guns and you’ll notice that they keep firing for a very long time. Just to clarify, an M-16 fires at 700–950 rounds per minute depending on the model, which means it fires between 11.67 and 15.83 rounds each second in fully-automatic mode.
A standard magazine contains 20 or 30 rounds. At that rate of fire, a 30-round magazine will be emptied in approximately 2–3 seconds. Also, note that a standard combat load for a U.S. infantryman is around 200 rounds plus or minus. This means if someone carrying a standard combat load fired everything on full-auto, he could comfortably finish firing his entire supply of ammunition in under two minutes, including reloading.
The same is true for all fully-automatic rifles, not just M-16s. AK-47s fire at a rate of 600 rounds per minute, which is 10 rounds/second, which means they will empty a 30-round magazine in three seconds flat. An FN FAL has a similar rate of fire at 650–700 rounds per minute. This is why some military rifle models (such as the M16A2 and M16A4 models) do not support full-auto as an option and only offer single-shot and three-round-burst modes.
Now think of the scene in any movie, where guys or gals break into a room brandishing weapons in full-auto mode and proceed to fire for like 30+ seconds and break every glass in sight, all without reloading once. Now that you understand the physical limitations involved, do you think that could happen in real life?
Dive! Dive!
This next one implies that you can escape being hit with bullets by diving underwater. We have all witnessed the scene where the hero dives underwater while the villain shoots at the water in an attempt to hit him, but the hero always emerges unscathed. Is this really possible? Well, there is some truth to it.
If someone shoots into a large body of water, the water offers a lot of resistance to bullet movement and slows down bullets considerably. To test this one, the popular TV show, Myth Busters aired an episode that tested this myth. They rigged up a block of ballistic gel to simulate a human body and immersed it in a swimming pool. They then shot at it with various weapons.
One of the interesting things noted was that slower-moving bullets from a 9mm pistol seemed to penetrate deeper into the pool than faster-moving spitzer bullets from rifles such as the M1 Garand. In fact, faster-moving spitzer bullets tumbled when they hit the water’s surface and quickly lost their speed. At certain angles, the bullets just disintegrated upon hitting the water’s surface.
Some of the tests included shooting a 9mm pistol vertically into the water at a gel block that was directly below at 8 feet. The bullets lost enough energy that they could not penetrate the gel block. Another test was shooting at a 30-degree angle into the water’s surface (just as someone might shoot at a person escaping across water) with some surprising results.
One test of an AR rifle shooting NATO 5.56x45mm ammunition with a muzzle velocity of 2,700 feet per second from a range of 10 feet. The water impact caused the jacketed bullet to shatter when it hit the water’s surface — with no fragments penetrating the gel block. At a range of 3 feet, the bullet broke up as before, but the tip of the bullet just slightly penetrated the gel block in what would produce a non-fatal injury.
Using an M1 Garand rifle (which fires a much larger bullet at 2,600 feet per second) showed similar results. At a range of 10 feet, the bullet simply shattered on hitting the water’s surface, and at 2 feet, it barely penetrated the gel block. When they used a Barrett .50 caliber rifle (the largest shoulder-fired weapon in service), the result was the bullets creating a big splash upon hitting the surface of the water, but they either disintegrated or lost enough momentum after traveling in 3 feet of water that they couldn’t inflict a fatal wound to anyone below this depth.
The conclusion was that this scenario could work if the person is deep enough underwater, as water does decelerate bullets by a surprisingly huge amount. Also, faster-moving spitzer bullets tend to disintegrate a lot quicker when they hit the water surface, depending on the angle and speed.
I Don’t Need No Stinking Spearguns!
So long as we are in the water on this, the last one we will look at is whether you can fire a gun underwater. The first thing I need to mention is that some may have heard of special forces using guns that can fire underwater. To clarify, there is the Russian SPP-1, which is a pistol that was invented for combat divers.
The truth is that you don’t need a special gun that fires underwater, most modern ordinary weapons can do so, but it is an extremely bad idea. The first thing that must be understood is that sound carries a lot further underwater, so if you happen to be underwater when firing a weapon, it could rupture your eardrums and severely disorient or render you unconscious due to the shockwave.
The second problem is when the barrel contains an air bubble when underwater, the bullet travels through the bubble and then hits the water. Because the water is not as compressible as air, the pressure spreads in all directions. With the sudden pressure building up, something has to give and it usually ends up with either the barrel or the action failing.
Let’s assume for the moment that you clear the weapon of all air bubbles and then attach a string so that the weapon remains underwater to fire while the shooter stays out of the water (or at least with their head out). In that case, most modern weapon wills fire. However, the range of the weapon will be severely shortened since water provides significantly more resistance to bullets than air. Tests have determined that even an M-1 Garand bullet only had a range of around 6 feet) when fired underwater.
The resistance of water also applies to the operating mechanisms of automatic and semi-automatic weapons. This means that these weapons will most likely not go through their operating cycles and most likely will only fire one shot. In conclusion, it is possible to fire a gun underwater, but it is an extremely bad idea.
I hope this has addressed some of the things about firearms you may have questioned over the years and provides some truth and understanding for you. Surely you have some favorite firearm movie myths (lasers, suppressors) of your own. Share them in the comment section.