Guns and popular media

Can you guys making movies and television shows get a clue? Please? Kenny already mentioned the bogus scene in World Trade Center movie where a dead police officer's gun begins 'cooking off' the cartridges due to the high heat and fire. I have to add my two cents to this stoopid, stoopid scene! The gun in question appears to be a Glock semi-automatic handgun which is laying on its side on a piece of concrete. After the first round fires off, all by itself, then the gun cycles, loads the next round in the magazine into the chamber, fires that round and repeats the process until the gun is out of ammunition!

This scene completely ignores reality and most importantly, Newton's 2nd 3rd Law of Motion that dictates that for every action, there must be an equal and opposite reaction. First, even if the gun could be made to fire the first time without anyone holding it or pulling the trigger, (highly improbable), the reaction to the force applied by the bullet leaving the front of the gun would push the gun off of the concrete where it began. It would not stay in the same place without moving. Secondly, any semi-automatic handgun requires a firm grip to resist the recoil of firing so that the mechanical devices in the gun can function and the slide operate properly to extract the fired cartridge and feed a new cartridge into the chamber. It is entirely possible to grip a gun like a Glock loosely enough to intentionally cause a malfunction; its called limp wristing.

It is also completely unrealistic that if a gun were undergoing such high heat that cartridges were firing due to heat, that each one would go off in order as they cycled through the chamber, which, as already discussed, is impossible. If the gun got that hot, cartridges would simply explode inside the magazine and the grip of the pistol and it would happen in a random, uncontrolled order.

Don't forget that for the gun to fire without such outrageous heat, the firing pin must be cocked, which is a result of the proper slide operation and someone's finger must be on the trigger to disengage the safety and release the firing pin. A Glock handgun simply cannot fire without numerous mechanical functions taking place in the right order and with the correct forces properly applied.

So a complete BOO! on the movie creators that allowed that scene to be included! Its unfeasible, physically impossible and dumbass. It promotes a 'scary', unreasonable fear of firearms for anyone not already familiar with this gun's operation. It distracted from an otherwise well done movie.

One more thing, this time for the television producers- Glock firearms don't have external hammers! There is nothing to cock to make the gun ready to fire after chambering a shell. So will you please stop playing the sound of a Colt Single Action Army revolver, (click, clack click) each and every time someone engages a bad guy on any of the CSI television shows? I can't tell you how many times I have observed a TV character draw his scary, black pistol from his holster, point it at someone he is trying to apprehend, then the sound of the pistol cocking is played, to let the viewer know he really means business. Just stop it! By the same token, there is no sound of the pistol being de-cocked before re-holstering it, which I have also heard.

You TV folks work so hard to produce realistic, gritty shows with all the drama of finding the tiniest piece of evidence to exonerate or convict but you continually misrepresent the use of firearms with these bogus sound effects. So quit it! Take yourself to a gun store and check out the sounds. Then fix your damm shows!