doublegunshop.com - home Forums General Discussion DoubleGun BBS @ doublegunshop.com Guns in books

its called suspension of disbelief gentlemen.

youre suppose to be focused on the plot, not the details.

its this.......$$$

so, directors trim in areas that are not required to make the plot move forward.

now, if all of you that are annoyed by these imperfect details were to take a trip, im sure Hollywood or whatever film studio is filming, would gladly accept your free advice and have you supply them the correct guns.

money an issue? no wages?
are you starting to see why they don't really care about the details?
its not just guns either. odds are, while youre watching for gun mistakes, a zillion other things are getting by you unaware.
cars, appliances, phones, saddles, clothing, you name it. directors would be over budget in a snap if they had to use everything perfectly correct.

the biggest error in filming is language and terms. most script writers don't study the talk of the era, and use modern buzz words and jargon. now that's a burr in my saddle, when a 1800's cowboy yells out in a bar scene...'you go girl!'

But going back to the title (books) . . . it's not that hard to do a little research and get the gun stuff right. If authors are going to be specific about what their hero is packing, then they ought to make that much effort.

The publisher's editors are supposed to cure technical flaws. A friend of mine who fishes with a known author receives final drafts and brings up such matters and was told by the author that his publisher's editors are paid to make corrections. Despite that, I've seen errors fall between the stools. Gil

On that note Bob....I've always wondered if the flowery (and profane) vernacular they used in the HBO series "Deadwood" was accurate....I have my doubts.

Why should we be either shocked or surprised when book authors make glaring errors concerning the guns they write about?

Just look at all of the misinformation and intentional falsehoods about guns that comes from our Liberal Left Fake News media organizations and from Democrat Congressmen. Equipping Festus on Gunsmoke with a Model 94 instead of an 1873 isn't near as bad as claiming that semi-autos are machine guns. One is entertainment, and the other involves deceptively attempting to take away our Constitutional Rights.

I don't remember the titles, but I have seen two movies in the last year in which someone closed a double accompanied by the sound of a slide racking.

You're talking copy editors. And the assumption is that they know the nuts and bolts of what it is they're editing. When Iowa State University Press published the first edition of my pheasant hunting book, they didn't have anyone on staff capable of catching any technical errors I made. But then I was careful not to make any. Second edition, published by the same outfit that does Shooting Sportsman, I had an editor who knew the subject well. And it wasn't as much a case of catching technical errors as it was helping me make it a better book, simply because he understood the subject matter.

Slightly different version of the same issue: Back when I was teaching high school French, one of my students was the daughter of an evangelical preacher who'd written a pamphlet that he'd had translated into French. She asked me if I'd take a look. Turned out that whoever did the translation was obviously fluent in French, but not in American English idioms--several of which had been translated literally. Gave me a good laugh, and I helped with a few corrections.