Are there any "accurate" modern TV shows?

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Skribs said:
9mmfan, the episode of Criminal Minds you mentioned - civilian gun ownership is not presented as a common thing as a "just in case" mindset, but someone who fears for he life going out and getting a shotgun for defense against a specific threat.

Yessir, I think I was going for a compare and contrast kinda thing. Though sometimes my rants veer off and take on a life of their own, so I'm not always quite sure.:D

mavracer said:
Joe Mantegna trys to keep Criminal Minds on the straight and narrow.

Yessir as well. I like Joe Mantegna and appreciate what he does, as both an actor and ambassador for the shooting sports. I enjoyed the behind the scenes visit to the Criminal Minds set on Shooting Gallery.

Lest anyone get the wrong idea, I do occasionally do things besides watch television and read this forum.:evil:
 
TV show episodes must fit within a limited time. It's sort of silly to think they are going to introduce the fact that a character owns firearms for normal, legal purposes if such is not relevant to the story.
 
Whenever the cops run into someone with a gun in most TV shows, either:

We are talking about a medium where you get amnesia from a bump on the head and you get cured by another bump on the head. I haven't seen that for a while but at one time it was on just about every sitcom going. They still have their totally off the wall, wacky plot devices that are in the end just plain stupid.

BTS I don't like Duck Dynasty either. It's just stupid IMO. But they do show guns and gun owners in a positive light. And Swamp People may not be totally accurate but considering it comes from Hollywood it's pretty close. Sure they edit things in ways that any 4 year old would see through. That's just typical Hollywood. The completely idiotic things they try to make you believe are downright insulting. For example on that Hillbilly Blood: A Hardscrabble Life show (they seem to love us hillbilly folk for some reason) they show the main characters trying to save a bunch of spoiled meat by turning it into bio-diesel. They work for 2 days and use all sorts of equipment they either buy or build to make about a gallon of fuel. They then sell it to a guy for his tractor and that saves the money the guy lost on the spoiled meat. What's a gallon of diesel go for now? $4 or so? Yeah they really saved the day with that $4 payoff.

There's a lot of hokey stuff to reality shows for sure. But Swamp People does show people hunting for a living and they use guns to do it. That's a positive thing IMO. It beats the other crap they show like where they have hillbillies shooting tires on cars or shooting right beside people to scare them and constantly threatening to shoot and kill someone. That ginseng show did all of those things. I don't even watch much of the crap on tv. I never watch anything on the big networks unless it's sports or local news. And even those things are rigged. TV is a big waste of time IMO.
 
It's sort of silly to think they are going to introduce the fact that a character owns firearms for normal, legal purposes if such is not relevant to the story.

This is true. However, most shows deal with civilian gun ownership not by ignoring it and assuming it's common, but by demonizing the gun owner unless they were government trained (and even then, half the time demonize them if they're not still a government agent). So they do have the time to devote to it.
 
Breaking Bad - besides being an excellent show in most other respects - has an accurate portrayal of gun ownership. Not positive, but accurate. I was very impressed with the scene where Walt goes to a lot of trouble to contact a black market gun dealer to buy a snub nose revolver. Classic "shady deal in a motel room" scene that we've seen in many movies, but then Breaking Bad turns it on its head.

The dealer actually tells Walt he's happy to take his money, but the same gun can be found in any sporting goods store for a fraction of the price, and legally. Good colloquial use of the phrases "stand your ground" and "castle doctrine" by the dealer, if I remember correctly. The scene feels like it was written and acted by people who have spent a lot of time in gun shops and at gun shows.
 
I find the scenes in "Justified" where Raylan draws his striker fired pistol and you hear the click of a hammer being cocked to be particularly realistic.
 
I'm not saying that it has to be about a law abiding citizen. I'm saying just about any procedural drama or action show I've seen uses the gun as a prop to prove someone's background. Things like,
"What do you need a gun for, what are you scared of?"
"He's packing some pretty expensive hardware, this must be a professional hitman."
"He can hit an 8" target at 300 yards, he must have military sniper training."

Etc. etc. Whenever the cops run into someone with a gun in most TV shows, either:
A) They are a criminal
B) They have government training (either they are a current agent/officer or an ex-agent/officer)
C) They are a paranoid redneck mall-ninja
D) They just realized they're in trouble and got a gun for protection or for revenge

There is no E) they got a gun a long time ago and learned how to use it from civilian instructors in the event they are attacked. At least in most of the stuff I've watched.
How would the encounter with law enforcement be initiated? I've seen a few Law & Order episodes that centered around self defense shootings by regular Joe civilians. But, for the most part, if the writers were to adhere to reality and the law, there wouldn't be much of an episode. Also, consider most TV shows are based in cities like New York and Chicago, where gun control is high and lawful civilian carry is low.

Also, option E is a bit far fetched for the average TV watching zombie.

Violence sells. Drama sells. Suspense sells. A lawfully armed citizen is rarely violent, dramatic or suspenseful. Which is also why crimes prevented by lawfully armed citizens are virtually ignored by the profit based mainstream media.
 
There's still plenty of garbage on tv that portray rural people as lawless loons. They especially like to pick on West Virginia it seems. They have always hated WV since it first broke away from Virginia. It wasn't long before the mythology of the hillbilly as born and it was WV and Kentucky that was the central location for those wild people.

It is not just "Yankee" areas of the Appalachians that have a hillbilly reputation and some of that reputation is well deserved. I lived in east TN when "Operation Rose Thorn" took place in Cocke County, TN. The local police / sheriff department was running the criminal activity in the county: drug trafficking, chop shops, the hijacking of interstate shipments, organized gambling, prostitution, fraud, attempted money laundering, racketeering and public corruption. More than a dozen members of law enforcement were arrested and convicted. Pretty much the script of Justified in real life.

http://www.knoxnews.com/special/cockecounty/

The sad thing is local people defend them and say it isn't the "Feds" business what they do in Cocke County.
 
I hate to say it but that scandal doesn't come close to the Morgan Co. Connection scandal in KY. The sheriff of the county was bought off, judges were bought and get this - the state police commissioner was a ring leader. The deal was that drugs were flown in to a small airport in Morgan Co.. They supplied almost the entire east coast with cocaine and pot at the time. That's why they gave it the name Morgan County Connection because it was like the French Connection.

But I know of similar incidents in Ohio where the state patrol and the sheriff and the local city police along with judges were all being paid by a drug dealer. The feds eventually busted the guy, who was selling Oxycontin and the LEO's counted like 150 people a day going into his house either to sell him the pills they got from doctors or to buy pills.

Then there's places like Detroit where (yes I've been picking on Detroit because I'm ticked off at that city big time - gang bangers from there have invaded my home town selling heroin among other things). I have no doubt that they pay people off too. The stories are there. Serpico busted a huge corruption ring in the NYPD. The mob kept the entire government bought off for years. Al Capone was the worst mobster of all time and he certainly wasn't from Appalachia.

Corruption is not something that is limited to that part of the world. Heck the mob ran Russia for 10 years. Europe was ran by thugs for 700 years. Yet you want to claim that Appalachia is somehow worse than the rest of the world? I don't think so.

I'm certainly not in favor of criminal behavior anywhere. I just don't think we have a monopoly on it. Not by a long shot. Let's talk Miami in the 1980's. Let's talk the Mexican border right now. Good grief the things that go on here now pale in comparison to those things. No one is flying planes into the Morgan Co. airport now. That ended in the early 80's. But go down to one of the border towns on the Mexican border and watch what goes on. Appalachia is far from the worst place for crime. It's not even close. Gangs are relatively unknown here or they were until the Detroit gangs, looking for new markets for their drugs, started making the trip to my area. Here's a story that is just an example of what's happening here. FWIW I saw a more recent story that involved even more heroin coming into Huntington.

http://www.wsaz.com/news/headlines/...-80000-Heroin-Bust-in-West-End-238295831.html

It's almost entirely gangs from Detroit that are responsible for the heroin in my area. I probably see an average of one bust per week of people from Detroit bringing heroin into this area. I could give you links to more stories but this one should be enough.

BTW there is an ongoing criminal organization in the town right next to where I grew up. They have been operating for decades. They were the actual kingpins of that Morgan Co. operation. They almost got busted once but they pinned everything on a scapegoat and they skated. I would tell you where they operate but to be honest they scare the crap out of me. They were killing people when I was a kid. Nothing has changed. The world is full of corruption. No one area has a monopoly on it. And my area is no worse than other areas. In fact I'd say it isn't as bad in spite of the corruption that I know is part of the region.
 
Hell On Wheels is a lot of fun with a lot of cool guns. Not perfect, like the .44 caliber Griswold (that should be .36 caliber) but I understand that the larger bore looks more intimidating on-screen. They rarely shoot 18 shots in 10 seconds from a six shooter as well! :D And actually have gone into some detail about loading a cap&ball revolver. One scene, an 1858 Remington goes empty and the lead character, Bohannan, has to swap cylinders quickly before the bad guy reloads.

Like others, Justified comes to mind but it does have it's share of mistakes and the overused cocking sounds with shotguns and semiautos. On the other hand, a few times an uncocked 1911 is brandished then fired without cocking it.
 
On the subject of guns on television, what ever happened to "Sons of Guns"?
I appreciated seeing the types of guns that I can't even dream of playing with and the work they did on them.
It was a bit dramatic but it was a good show IMO.
 
Pawn Stars actually shows gun owners in a positive light. They are mostly collector types but not always. Sometimes they buy and sell firearms just for their "bang" power.
 
I like "Wild West Guns" on Animal Planet. It shows guns, shooting, hunting and gun ownership for all legal purposes in a positive light. There is far less invented drama compared to some of the other gun shop shows.

It seems that most episodes of "Sons of a Gun" involve Will or his daughter taking on a job that should take a month with a one week deadline. The guys in the shop get the thing done and are are tweaking it when Will comes in and says "I'll show you guys how to do this" although they already did the difficult engineering. The shows ends with shooting exploding targets with everyone yelling awesome. The one with the gunshop in CO is the same.

Wild West Guns is the one of best PR vehicles for the American shooter.
 
> a few times an uncocked 1911 is brandished then fired without cocking it.

My wife *loves* those scenes. She points and jeers, and makes insulting comments about the actor, writer, director, and producer... she also likes the scenes where a pistol gets cocked two or three times, which is supposed to be a cinematic way to raise tension, or something.
 
Longmire has some over the top gunplay, but as it is set in Montana it's a GIVEN that everyone is armed.

And that's not portrayed as a bad thing.

It's still got its share of stereotypes but it portrays citizens with guns as a day to day reality.
 
LOL@ Longmire...I love the show, but being from South Dakota, some of it is just too corny (but is still a show I watch religiously, so I've gotten past it). I haven't noticed any glaring inaccuracies regarding guns, but the secret "illegal rodeo" episode just had me chuckling....What, exactly, would a rodeo have to consist of to be "illegal"? Rodeos not sanctioned by any of the major organizations happen frequently, and there's nothing illegal about having a contest of skill. They made kit sound as though rodeo was a sport frequently gambled on, and having been to and part of hundreds of rodeos, that's hardly the case. I felt that particuklar ep did the sport of rodeo a big disservice to anyone who couldn't see how inaccurate it really was
 
The thing about Longmire that I like is his 45 Colt and how he grabs a Winchester when he needs a rifle.
The thing I don't understand about the show is how a relativly small, rural population county can have so many murders all the time...? :confused:
 
e thing I don't understand about the show is how a relativly small, rural population county can have so many murders all the time...?
I beleive the proximity to the reservation plays a role, as it does in real life. South Dakota isn't exactly known as a hotbed of violence, but violent crime including murder is hardly unheard of. Just within the past month, we had a double homicide on the Rosebud Reservation, and when one of the suspects was arrested, he attempted to stab a federal agent. Halloween night, a police pursuit and officer involved shooting that started on the Crow Creek reservation ended up in a standoff situation in my hometown of Pierre, where a cop was shot. "Indian Country" can be violent and dangerous. Thats not mean to be racist in any way. The statistics back up that assertion. This violence is largely a result of high rates of poverty, unemployment, and drug and alcohol abuse. Indian reservations, at least many of them, are the equivalent of rural ghettos in terms of vilence, poverty, and general hoeplessness, which is not at all aided by tribal governments that are oftentimes largely corrupt and looking out for themselves more than their people. Its a reality not many see, but the same trends have seemingly continued as long as I can remember (I grew up not on the Rosebud Reservation, but bordering it)
 
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Are there any "accurate" modern TV shows?

No

... at least if you mean anything besides the occasional documentary.

jm, sans a television since 1997
 
Not a TV show but I saw it on TV so maybe it counts somewhat. During the movie "Angels and Demons" the Italian Police Chief (I guess that's his title?) for the Vatican grabs a Sig Sauer pistol from his vault, loads a full magazine, racks the slide and then, get ready for this.... He DECOCKS it.
 
Alaska the Last Frontier is about a real homesteading family with use of guns for food gathering and protection from predators.A fair representation of rural alaskan life.
 
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