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(Hilarious Trope) That's not how this gun works!
EDIT: Just so you know, I might have been wrong about the 3rd example!
The Simpsons (Season 30, Episode 9) - The character is holding a revolver (which is normally charged by putting the bullets inside the cylinder) and charging it by putting a magazine in the grip like a Glock. Please note that this was done intentionally to make fun of how guns are portrayed unrealistically in movies;
Shadow the Hedgehog video game - In one of the trailers, Shadow is holding what I think was an M4A1 and, in this shot, he is arming it by pulling the handguard like a shotgun. The handguard is only for protecting the shooter from the heat generated by the barrel.
Stranger Things (Season 5, Episode 8) - During the fight with the Mindflayer, Nancy is loading an M4A1-5, and, after she inserts a magazine, she is pushing the carrying handle to arm it like a shotgun. That's not what a carrying handle is for, obviously.
I want to mention that I know there's another popular example with a silencer for a shotgun or something, but I am not familiar with it. Also, I tried my best to identify each gun, so please correct me if I was wrong about any of them.
Funnily enough this would explain why it takes sustained fire from one of these to drop Chell in the Portal games; she's not bulletproof, the turrets just aren't firing the bullets with enough velocity to kill.
I’m absolutely going to steal this and use it either in a story or a dnd character, I can’t wait to pull out this image when my dm says “ummm that’s not a realistic gun.”
Recent Forgotten Weapons video mentions it being a safety thing. The inventor was concerned about carrying striker-fired handguns around with a live bullet in the chamber, so the Landstad has the live round in the bottom cylinder and then rotates it into alignment with the barrel and striker when you pull the trigger
So notably this was before the release of the 1911 aka the semi auto pistol all semi auto pistols since are designed off of
There were magazine fed pistols before this but it was still a wild west era of firearms
What you see here is the sole example of this pistol ever made. Not survived- made. He made it in norway and gave it to the norweigan army hoping theyd accept it as their new service pistol.
Nope, that's the whole gun. It was made to be the cheapest possible gun, so it does come with many issues such as
A brittle firing pin that can shatter
a plastic bolt, which is so light it cycles too fast for the magazine to feed. It also can shatter
a bolt "handle" that for some fucking reason is placed right next to the barrel. Like the thingy at the front is something you have to push. If you're not careful you can shoot your finger off
Fun fact, the modeler for all of the guns is left handed, so he made all of the guns to be held if the player was left handed. Since majority of people are right handed, they just mirrored the models.
We got that wireless ammo. Honestly with how many ways there are to automatically teleport rounds into your mag, or overflow your mag to well beyond normal and/or reasonable levels, this silliness is the least of our concern.
Destiny has a lot of goofy looking and mechanically questionable weapons (hand cannons in general lmao), but most can be semi explained with stuff like energy/liquid ammo, matter transmutation, or space magic. Conspirator is a kinetic weapon with normal ass bullets tho.
You know it's funny, and I'm gonna age myself here. Back in the day, Bungie created Marathon on the Mac. (Not sure if it went to PC.) They included tools for making your own maps, Forge. One of the "features" they touted was "5D space." You could create a sort of figure 8 hallway design, have the hallways overlap in the middle, and depending on which one you were looking down, it would appear as an unobstructed hallway. Of course, this was because their engine was simpler than today's engines, but I always thought it was funny that they promoted that little tidbit.
I choose to believe this is in homage to Marathon/Forge's 5D space, and to the clip, there's just an unobstructed path to the chamber. :)
Actors who need to wield a gun in a movie should be made to practice using it with live rounds at a range or something so they can get a feel for the recoil they need to pretend it has.
Many do, but when it comes time to shoot (hehe), they use prop guns or not guns for certain scene setups for safety reasons (just look at what happened on the set of Rust for why thats the case, and even earlier, The Crow).
Robert Patrick famously practiced shooting so much that he does not flinch, grimace, squint, or blink when firing during Terminator 2, even for indoor sequences where the flash and sound from even a blank firing pistol would be disorienting and loud.
James Cameron also had problems filming the scene where he chases the car because he kept catching it.
At this point, I'm about 80% convinced that the way they had the T1000 phase through the bars of the jail cell is they just told Patrick to do it and he did.
It was something of a claim to fame for the early Terminator franchise.
Arnold claimed that when he got the role he practiced assembling, dissembling, servicing, loading, unloading, and reloading so he could do it blindfolded and be as mechanically smooth as possible. But in the TechNoir scene you clearly see him flinch in anticipation of the blanks' flash and sound. Robert Patrick, even without sunglasses in the mall corridor scene doesn't flinch.
To offer a Watsonian explanation, the reason the T-800 flinches is because it was still trying to pretend to be a human at that point, and a human would reasonably flinch in those circumstances (and regarding it breaking that guy's hand, he was actively impeding the mission, so it allowed some of its cover to drop to deal with that; plus SKYNET AIs have shown to be very… idiosyncratic when it comes to pretending to be human). If its attack failed (which it did) it would need to keep its cover to continue hunting Sarah. The T-1000 doesn't have this problem because it's away from other people in the hallway, and can also just change its cover whenever it wants.
Alternatively, the T-800 was trying to protect its auditory systems for use on the off chance Sarah escaped, because they could still be damaged by the shockwave.
As a comic fan it always annoyed me that they gave Rick such an impractical gun as his main weapon, when in the comics he just started off with the kind of standard issue sidearm you'd expect modern police to carry.
At this point, seeing the gun designs in Deadlock i'm sure Valve keeps their gun designer locked in a monastery so that they do not learn how a gun could possibly work
cause originally that animation/weapon was for an OICW with a built-in grenade launcher, but that weapon was cut, and the MP7 was shifted from the SMG slot to replace it.
many people THINK HL1's MP5 with an underbarrel grenade launcher isn't real, too. But that one actually does exist.
For anyone not familiar with the P90 the magazine lays flat across the top of the gun and it’s a bull-pup style gun which means the firing mechanism is behind the trigger. If they wanted a belt fed P90 the bullets should be entering from the top about 2/3rds of the way to back, right where you see the color change from dark gray to light gray.
Honorable mention - "DC-34 Automatic shotgun, there is only 3 of them in the world" that Batman turned into non-lethal version that shoots small Batarangs...it's just KSG 12
Nope. It's just that when the gun was first added to the game, it originally only had a two grenade capacity, but it was later buffed with an extra grenade without changing the model.
It was at this moment that Jonathan Ferguson, The Keeper Of Firearms And Artillery At The Royal Armories Museum In The UK Which Houses A Collection Of Thousands Of Iconic Weapons From Throughout History knew... the game's fucked up.
The Loch-n-Load in tf2 wich has two slots for grenades on the model but has three grenades on the clip, this happens because on release the weapon had two grenades instead of three
A lot of guns in tf2 are like this, especially demomans.
Scouts scattergun doesnt do anything between shots and reloading is electing every fired shot, even if it has a loading gate.
Soldier's nested rockets.
Demoman's sticky bomb launchers are just repeatedly cocked, and every grenade launcher he loads grenades into a single chamber.
Even if it is strange and unrealistic i think it fits for tf2. The characters alredy operate by looney tunes logic, shooting at your feet to jump higher, eating sandwiches to heal and wearing cardboard masks to disguise yourself, it makes sense that their weaponry would also operate like that
It’s part of a series of fake guns that deliberately look nothing like their actual counterparts to avoid copyright issues and fire off little bursts of flammable gas instead of using blanks. They’re used for safety or for when blank firing guns can’t be used.
Edit: The guns are designed to fire squibs of various potency, allowing to to work around noise and safety issues.
The use of nonguns has nothing to do with copyright, it's entirely a safety issue. Basically you use one when the insurance company says you have to, the scene when Combo gets shot in Breaking Bad is a perfect example. The kid firing the gun is under 18, so the production insurance forced them to use a nongun.
Copyright only applies to creative works, you can't copyright the look of a gun. You can patent the design of the gun, but that only applies to someone trying to manufacture a copy, it has nothing to do with showing it in a movie or TV show.
Adding to that, I'm pretty sure prop guns of this caliber (ba-dum tiss) is supposed to purposefully be shot (double ba-dum tiss) from a distance so that you don't see how shitty it looks. They probably used this one in this shot because they were under the gun (tr-tr-tr-triple ba-dum tiss) and didn't have time that day to get a decent-looking pistol.
I looked into it and it's literally just a gun designed to be a prop. Nothing more. It's pretty interesting though, I recommend going on IMFDB when you get a chance
The simpsons has tons of pump action double barrels. Also usually they pump forward then back (real life is the opposite) I guess it looks better in animation.
Scott (or Hope, can't remember) using ants to stop the hammer on Darren's gun in the first Ant-Man movie. Darren is clearly using a glock which doesn't have an external hammer.
The really funny thing about this is that the beretta 92fs is the other common handgun movies and shows like to use and that gub does have an external hammer so they could've easily avoided this.
You could use a Beretta, you could use a 1911, you could use a usp or a sig 220, all of which the armorer absolutely has lying around for props. But let's use a prop Glock...
I swear I just saw something about an anime where a character was loading a M-16 magazine into the bottom of an FN PS90, but I can’t find any evidence of it on the internet so I might have just imagined that.
This happens in Max Payne 3, Max just kind of tapes a bottle to his gun and it functions for a while.
The Last of Us 2 also has a bottle suppressor.
Hypothetically, a bottle as the basis for a jury rigged suppressor Is not impossible, but It would need more than just a bottle and tape, and it won't last more than a few shots, because the gasses will probably obliterate the bottle, in theory, perchance.
Pretty sure this kind of silencer was used in "Shooter" (2007). When Bob comes to rescue the FBI agent guy, he uses a bottle made silencer on his rifle. As you note, it only silences for about one or two shots, because it gets completely obliterated in the process. But turns out he only needed it to be quiet for about that many shots.
To add on to the trope: in this scene they were filming a fake zombie movie when real zombies started attacking them. Luckily that had real live ammunition on set to defend themselves with. This is something no film production would ever do* as it's extremely unsafe.
The Fallout 4 “Assault Rifle” for those unfamiliar
Honestly yeah they coulda saved themselves a massive hassle if they had just named the damn thing a “Machine Gun” like it was originally-intended. Even if it was still in 5.56 I genuinely think the backlash would not have been significant as it was lmao
I'm not a gun guy, but my understanding of a lot of "silencers" don't actually silence much or at least not with some of the guns depicted. (I think Anton Chigurh's shotgun silencer in NCFOM was made for the movie because there's no such thing outside of some dude on the internet who apparently made one two years ago)
Also people racking shotguns for show and not ejecting a shell
Gun people can correct me if I got anything wrong
Edit: thanks for the info, peops! Glad I at least got silencers/suppressors somewhat right.
I very much would like to see the silencer trope subverted more often. (Especially in a video game. Call it a "silencer" and don't explicitly explain to players how they work in the real world)
Silencers are misrepresented as creating a gun that is whisper quiet. It substantially reduces noise from the explosion in the chamber but it’s still loud.
Additionally the sonic boom of the bullet can range from loud to uncomfortably loud. There is subsonic ammo though. .45 ACP is inherently subsonic.
Also, there is noise from the cycling of the action. All together very good for reducing noise but the silent assassin trope is pure Hollywood.
As far as pump shotguns, if you fill the magazine, the first cycle of the action via the pump will chamber a round but eject nothing if there is no empty shell in the chamber.
They’re loud… they’re so loud. Some pistols you can get away with comfortably not wearing ear protection (still terrible for your ears tho) but in so many movies people’s ears would immediately blow up with ringing and stay that way for a while
One of the more egregious things about silencers is the sound they make they don’t go “pew-pew” like a little laser gun; it’s more of a sharp “clack”, like a firecracker.
The most accurate sounding suppressors I’ve heard were in “The Bourne Identity” and “The Accountant”.
You’re right about silencers. The best they do is muffle the explosion a bit, but you’re still hearing the sonic booms of the projectiles themselves at least.
As for racking the shotgun and not ejecting a shell, that can easily happen if there’s no shell in the chamber to begin with. If the gun was fully empty, and all you did was load the magazine tube, if you racked it, you’d load a shell but you wouldn’t eject one
Yeah, silencers are more like ear protection you apply to the gun. It's still loud- absolutely louder than the quiet thwip they make in movies- but they're not gonna deafen you quite as much.
Surprised scout's scattergun (tf2) isn't here. Its a double-barrelled, lever-action, semi-automatic shotgun. It also reloads somehow by actioning the lever repeatedly. (This can also be said of the stickybomb launcher, which reloads by just actioning the bolt)
Really? I loved being a lefty shooter. Righties would sometimes catch hot brass down their collar from the shooter on their left but being a lefty with my head tilted left the brass from the other guy would just bounce off my Kevlar. Never had an issue with my own brass either.
they canonically get all the shittiest guns mann co don't even want to spend the money to scrap. it's extremely on brand for them to have been given all the unsold left-handed guns.
The reason for this is that the artist used the actual bit used on the model as reference. It’s missing a piece of the back so it can look like it’s tucked under the arm.
I rewatched Stargate on a whim, and there is a scene inside the room on the alien planet with the stargate when the ship lands. Every time the soldiers turn a corner or turn around, they cock their guns.
In your last example you probably mean the shotgun from No Country For Old Men, used by the antagonist, Anton Chegur. Funnily enough, is it a real attachment and there are actually silencers for shotguns. They're obviously far less effective but hey
One of the most overlooked examples of this is LMGs in FPS games, they portray the bolt locking handle as a charging handle that springs forward like a AK-47.
In reality it’s an open bolt weapon that locks the bolt to the rear when ready to fire, so the charging handle is freely ridden forward by the shooter. I believe this mistake is because the semi auto LMGs sold to civilians are closed bolt weapons so the devs think it applies to the full auto machine guns as well.
Pictured here in the M240 from MW2, but it appears in multiple games in the 2010s. Only recently are they starting to get it right.
Actually, this could work. The RPG 7 uses a conventional charge to blast the rocket forwards away from the user before the rocket motor starts burning. This is done to prevent the user being cooked by the rocket exaust. In theory, you could replace part of the shovel handle with one of those conveyional charges. Thus launching the shovel out the front but without any rocket propulsion
Now I may not be the most knowledgeable on guns, but I'm reasonable sure regularly having broth running through the insides of a gun is going to lead to corrosion and other buildup, even with regular maintenance - Assassination Classroom
The machine gun in Sergio Corbucci’s iconic spaghetti western Django (1966). Is it a Gatling Gun? Is it a Maxim gun? It seems to be an unholy hybrid of both, firing from multiple fixed barrels. Also the ammo belt that appears to be about 3 feet long lasts a very very long time.
The rule of cool definitely applies here, as this movie exists in a sort of a timeless Old West where it’s both 1870 and 1910 at the same time.
this AMAZING video is only about Starfield's mostly horrible/AI-looking/incorrect guns (like the "collectible revolver" M1911) but the youtuber, ItsYaBoyBrandyBoy, made alot more videos like these, about Fallout 4, Fallout London, Cyberpunk, and one of my personal fav, Peakguard
For those who are gonna read this and assume it's saying Bethesda is using AI to design guns, it's not - Bethesda has been making good, old-fashioned, improbable, unrealistic, questionable, and downright nonsensical human-crafted gun designs since long before AI was a thing.
They're marginally better with their sci-fi ones, but if it fires actual bullets there's a 70% chance it's nonsense. If it's meant to be an IRL gun it's almost guaranteed to be nonsense.
The Stranger Things girl is using an M16A1 carbine variant designated XM177E2 or unofficially the CAR-15 or Colt Commando, not an "M4A1-5" (whatever that is?). The real proper M4 platform only really started to show up in the 90s within the US Military, while the show took place predominantly in the late 80s I think idk I never watched it.
After a bit of research while writing this comment apparently she technically did not use her weapon wrong, just with a highly unorthodox way. She's not pushing the carry handle, she's for some reason gripping it as she brings her thumb down to press down on the bolt release button.
I heard that too, apparently its less the actor being directed wrong and more the sound direction had no idea what it was doing as the bolt release and pulling the charging handle have distinct sounds.
My man is shooting a MAC-11 with a suppressor the size of a car muffler, a rifle scope mounted onto the suppressor, and his line of sight shows he's not even looking through the scope. Bro is either looking off to the side or directly into the butt of the gun while firing at targets.
Okay, to give the walking dead some credit here. The MAC-11 did have suppressors that big. They were designed that way so they could also act as a handguard allowing you to grip it for better ergonomics and also to add weight to the front helping with recoil. The scope was also apparently an homage to escape from new york
I'm gonna speak in defense of Stranger Things Season 5 (for literally only this one time).
Look at the position of Nancy's thumb. She's pressing the bolt release with her thumb. This is proper technique for reloading an AR pattern rifle from empty, as the bolt would already be locked back.
Now admittedly, the sound effect they used is a "racking the bolt" sound effect, which is incorrect and likely leads to this confusion.
Also, (and I know I'm being pedantic here) that isn't an M4A1. The M4A1 wasn't invented until 2010, and while Stranger Things hasn't always been great about historical accuracy, the carbine Nancy is using is a Colt XM177 (I think an E2 based upon the length of the barrel and the forward assist), which was introducing in the late 60s and thus is entirely accurate for the timeframe.
There was a PS3 game called Resonance of Fate, which featured gun customization to improve stats. Unfortunately these customization didn't reflect in the actual fights, so you don't get to see what it would look like to actually try using this gun
Hot Fuzz -afaik, the guns are actually used/loaded properly, but they added a bunch of random gun sound effects while they run to intentionally make fun of how often that is done in movies
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u/FaithlessnessSlow754 Jul 08 '26