Handgun Myths/Rumors/ Urban Legends

Status
Not open for further replies.
No fair, Chief. That's a full broadsied of nine shots.

Back OT, I think the biggest myth about any firearms is the "they just went off" myth.

Does anyone seriously know of any firearms that "just go off" when casually handled?

I personally think some of those "accidental deaths" where "the gun just went off" were actually premeditated murders disguised to look like accidents, and with some good acting and plenty of alligator tears, the cops buy it.
 
Thank you EVERYONE for your valuable posts and discussions in this thread. I got so many suggestions that I had to pick just a few for the show, but I have written down most all of them and will probably do a "Firearms Fallacies" Part II sometime in the future.

Thank you all so much for the time taken responding & education!!

The show can be listened to at www.handgunradio.com/005

Ryan
 
Movie myths die hard....

I like the hammer cocking sound when a character aims a Glock. (It's a wonder they don't use the the cha-chunk pump shot gun action sound effect when someone draws a revolver.)
 
"MIM is crap! No MIM in my gun! MIM will fail! I know firsthand, 326,654,954,001 people that had MIM fail! etc, etc, etc..."

Yes some of the early MIM forays had issues. That is not the case any more. If a person wants all Elvin forged parts? Fine, it's personal choice.
That doesn't mean a MIM part (when properly manufactured and appropriate to its particular application) is predisposed to failure. We live in an age of reasonably consistent, reliable and accurate firearms. This is due to in large part to modern manufacturing processes, including MIM.

Some things were better before. Some are better now. Some people confuse snobbery with wisdom.
 
bwahahahahaha; but seriously, no myths

Originally Posted by ExTank View Post
Can we agree that there is such a thing as "one shot stop" stopping power?

A little unwieldy, I agree; it definitely won't fit "Inside the Waistband."
Yes.

Wanna trade shots?

The 120mm APFSDS (Armor-Piercing, Fin-stabilized, Discarding-Sabot) penetrator round is only (only) 77mm diameter, and uses the physics of 11:1 rod ratios to burn a hole through a target tank. The physics of the impact create a plasma at the impact. The struck metal flexes in until the rod penetrates fully through. Whereupon it often carries on through the other side. But, if the round does not hit something critical, there may not be any sign visible from 3-4000m away that the round scored a "kill." So, tankers usually "double-tap" a target to get some sort of visible "secondary" result.

The 16" 50 caliber (barrel length = 50 bores/ calibers) naval rifle is an awesome thing. You put 600# (4.2million grains) behind a one ton projectile, and you get some results.

The tricky part, though, is that they were designed to be accurate of "minute of battleship." Which is to say 50% of the rounds will hit an ellipse 400' x 100' at a distance of 16-18 miles (a scant 33,000 yards). Which means if you are a 300'x65' destroyer, you have middling good odds for dodging "between the raindrops" as it were.

Mind you, those APC rounds are designed to cut through 16-18" of armor before the fuze detonates the bare 200# of explosive in the base of the round--so, your 1/2" - 1" plated Destroyer might not even set one off--which is not much consolation if the round trundles through the 1/3 of a destroyer that is the powerplant spaces. Or, if you've made the BB people real mad, and they demonstrate the recursive probability that occurs by adding additional rifles to the mix. (For you curious types, it's factorial of the number of barrels fired multiplied by the accuracy of the firing solution--four barrels fired on an 80% accurate solution gives you a 4! * 0.8 better CEP.)
 
I have a friend who is 63 years old, and ex-military.

He insists that he saw a fellow soldier in Desert Storm get shot in his hand with a .45acp, and that it took that soldier off his feet. Disappointing to hear that horse hockey from a military guy. Of course he also told me his 1911 will go full auto....... I've shot it. It doesn't.

Oh yeah, "The sound of a racking shotgun will send anyone running."

"460 and 500 magnum produce too much recoil to allow quick follow up shots, and are thus not practical for dangerous animal defense." Umm.... it's called practice.

"It's stupid to shoot 45 Colt or 454 Casull out of a 460 magnum because if that's what you want to do you should have bought a different gun, because doing it in an X-Frame is just using a platform that is unnecessarily heavy and bulky." Shooting either scaled down cartridges in a 460 is practical and a real joy. The extra weight makes follow up shots extremely fast even with 45 Colt +P. When you realize you are slinging 200+ gr weight bullets fast, and it feels like shooting a .22, I get a big smile on my face.

"All guns should be like GLOCKS." BS!!!!!!
 
Last edited:
The tricky part, though, is that they were designed to be accurate of "minute of battleship." Which is to say 50% of the rounds will hit an ellipse 400' x 100' at a distance of 16-18 miles (a scant 33,000 yards). Which means if you are a 300'x65' destroyer, you have middling good odds for dodging "between the raindrops" as it were.

Mind you, those APC rounds are designed to cut through 16-18" of armor before the fuze detonates the bare 200# of explosive in the base of the round--so, your 1/2" - 1" plated Destroyer might not even set one off--which is not much consolation if the round trundles through the 1/3 of a destroyer that is the powerplant spaces. Or, if you've made the BB people real mad, and they demonstrate the recursive probability that occurs by adding additional rifles to the mix. (For you curious types, it's factorial of the number of barrels fired multiplied by the accuracy of the firing solution--four barrels fired on an 80% accurate solution gives you a 4! * 0.8 better CEP.)

Good stats.

As a sailor (albeit a retired submariner), the problem with "dodging" anything being delivered as a bombardment is not knowing exactly where the next shell, out of a great many, is going to land. Nine turrents of three barrels, each with the capability of firing two rounds a minute for days on end, is a truely awesome amount of firepower to levy against any target, moving or not. (Your "additional rifles".) Especially when you consider the modern upgrades that were introduced in the 1980s, which tracked muzzel velocities of each round and tracked and targeted with modern radar and computers of the time. As the guns sequenced their shots, you'd be talking about one shell every 3 seconds...hour after hour, day after day.

The fuzing of the rounds with respect to thinner hulled ships is an interesting point. It might be interesting, however, for people who've never given thought to the destructive capabilities of even a non-explosive high velocity round to look up the old naval term "shiver"...as in "shiver me timbers".

Back before the days of explosive projectiles in naval guns, the majority of ship damage was caused literally by a massive cannonball smashing it's way through whatever it hit. And when it hit something like a ship's mast, or penetrated the hull or bulkheads, the wood would "shiver"...meaning it would explode into wooden shrapnel. An entire compartment of men could be shreded this way by a cannonball blowing through a bulkhead...or successive bulkheads. This in addition to whatever direct damage the cannonball did by impact.

Much the same would happen on modern naval vessels when you would blow a one ton hunk of metal through a ship at velocities in the neighborhood of 2,500 fps. Every space not directly impacted by the round as it passed through would be utterly devoid of human life anyway due to secondary effects similar to "shivering" on the old wooden ships.


And, as a side note for the interested, keep in mind what the original design concept of the battleship was: to be able to duke it out against other battleships, as in broadside combat. These ships were massively armored to be able to go toe-to-toe with other battleships...and survive.

This capability was somewhat muted with the advent of submarine and air warfare, and the role of the battleship changed accordingly. As a naval shore bombardment platform, it's one of the most scary things an enemy can see parked off its shores.
 
"The sound of a wracking shotgun will send anyone running."

CBS Minnesota, "Pregnant Woman With Shotgun Thwarts Burglars", COON RAPIDS, Minn. (WCCO) Channel 4. 6 Dec 2011

With a single pump of her 12-gauge shotgun, the would-be burglars bolted out the door and through the backyard.

“Yes, a shotgun racking is something you don’t forget if you’ve ever heard one. So, it frightened these two suspects off right away, they took off running,” said Coon Rapids Police Captain John Hattstrom.

It's an old self-defense cliche: "..."racking" of a pump gun is the nonverbal equivalent of saying, "you have been warned."" (quoted from trial consultant Wendy Saxon in The Jury Expert, American Society of Trial Consultants, vol 21 no 5, Sept 2009).

It has become a cliche because it happens. However, you should not count on it and you should be mentally prepared to follow through if necessary. Many times "I am armed ... you have been warned" (cha-chunk) is sufficient but you must be prepared for the times when it is not. It won't work on every attacker in every situation.
 
It has become a cliche because it happens. However, you should not count on it and you should be mentally prepared to follow through if necessary. Many times "I am armed ... you have been warned" (cha-chunk) is sufficient but you must be prepared for the times when it is not. It won't work on every attacker in every situation.

I agree. I should have said "Will always send anyone running." It isn't 100% and if you are in a situation where you have armed yourself, then you NEED to be prepared to shoot. If you want a sound to scare intuders out of your home, get a rotwieler, and train it to bark loudly at attackers before trying to tear their arm off.
 
Last edited:
That x will "send the bad guy running" or that y will "scare him off" are good examples of myths that might be true - sometimes. If they are not, and the good guy does not have something that will do more than "scare", he is in trouble.

Another myth, heavily promoted by the anti-gun gang, is that this or that kind of unarmed combat is better than a gun. "I am trained in Bing Bong Dong, and I can handle anyone even if he has a gun" is nonsense, and real unarmed combat experts know it and would never go up against a gun except as a last resort. I once watched a man on TV say that he could easily deal with a knife wielder, but not with a gun user, which is why "we have to ban guns." That man was about 99 years old and couldn't have "dealt with" a kitten, let alone a punk knife artist; he was, simply put, a liar, like most of the anti-gun types.

Jim
 
When I was a recruit in the (German) military, a Lieutenant told us about special high velocity bullets that are banned according to the Geneva convention. Anyone grazed by such a bullet would supposedly die from hydrostatic shock. According to this Lieutenant, these bullets/rounds were used by the Vietcong. When another recruit asked for the name of the gun that fired them, the Lieutenant made up a name on the spot.

The myth of the high velocity bullet or variations thereof is (or was?) an extremely common urban legend in the German military. It was just one of many BS stories that particular officer told us.

Are US soldiers fed similar fairy tales in basic training?


Edit: Just noticed that I posted a "rifle round myth" in a "handgun myth" thread - sorry for that ;)
 
Last edited:
When I was a recruit in the (German) military, a Lieutenant told us about special high velocity bullets that are banned according to the Geneva convention. Anyone grazed by such a bullet would supposedly die from hydrostatic shock. According to this Lieutenant, these bullets/rounds were used by the Vietcong. When another recruit asked for the name of the gun that fired them, the Lieutenant made up a name on the spot.

The myth of the high velocity bullet or variations thereof is (or was?) an extremely common urban legend in the German military. It was just one of many BS stories that particular officer told us.

Are US soldiers fed similar fairy tales in basic training?


Edit: Just noticed that I posted a "rifle round myth" in a "handgun myth" thread - sorry for that ;)

Outside of commonly recognized BS banter?

Not really. And anybody who really spouts such as if they really believe it tends to get shut down by the ridicule of others.

People trained for combat, such as Marines and Army infantry, for example, don't have much care for BS when it comes to training for the reality of such combat. My Marine Corps brother would tell you that.

Where this type of mythology may come from doesn't have anything to do with small arms fire. There is a world of difference between getting shot by, say, a combat rifle carried by infantry and getting shot by a 20mm round from a Vulcan cannon which is mowing down the forest from a circling C-130.

A shot in the shoulder by an M-16 cannot compare to a shot in the shoulder by a 20mm. The effects are too radically different.

But the extreme examples commonly given by most people (such as the pinky finger shot that kills) is pure BS.
 
""It's stupid to shoot 45 Colt or 454 Casull out of a 460 magnum because if that's what you want to do you should have bought a different gun, because doing it in an X-Frame is just using a platform that is unnecessarily heavy and bulky." Shooting either scaled down cartridges in a 460 is practical and a real joy. The extra weight makes follow up shots extremely fast even with 45 Colt +P. When you realize you are slinging 200+ gr weight bullets fast, and it feels like shooting a .22, I get a big smile on my face."

You forgot to comment on the guys who insist on trying for 454/460 loads out of Ruger 45LC's :neener: (sorry, had to go there :D :D :D). I normally reserve the "because if that's what you want to do you should have bought a different gun" line for those individuals, rather than the other way around :D

TCB
 
You forgot to comment on the guys who insist on trying for 454/460 loads out of Ruger 45LC's (sorry, had to go there ). I normally reserve the "because if that's what you want to do you should have bought a different gun" line for those individuals, rather than the other way around

Here here!!!
 
Are US soldiers fed similar fairy tales in basic training?
I was.

Not in basic, but as an E6 Staff Sargent in 1969 when a large mechanized unit was shipping out to Vietnam.

We ran the familiarization & qualification ranges for all small arms before they left.

And many of the troops ask me if it was true what that had been told by their officers that the 5.56 round was especially deadly, and would tear you in half.

BECAUSE THE BULLETS TUMBLED ALL THE WAY DOWN RANGE.
And hit like tiny buss-saws!!

I chalked it up to brass hat 'experts' spouting off about ballistics & rifle bullet accuracy they knew less then nothing about.

rc
 
Not sure if this has been said yet, but the Glock Perfection is a Myth.

I've owned and shot Glocks that had issues in the past....

The brass-to-face is not cool either.
 
The 16" 50 caliber (barrel length = 50 bores/ calibers) naval rifle is an awesome thing. You put 600# (4.2million grains) behind a one ton projectile, and you get some results.

How many ft-lbs of energy is that, for the kinetic energy obsessed among us? Ft-tons may not need as many digits. :D

I know the old battle wagons don't fit modern naval tactics, but they sure were menacing and beautiful ships. So much more impressive looking than any other ship.

I love the photo of the broadside on the prior page. Note the wake running perpendicular to the bow and the rest of the hull. I always heard the recoil of a full broadside would push the entire ship in the opposite direction. You can see it right there in the photo.
 
How many ft-lbs of energy is that, for the kinetic energy obsessed among us? Ft-tons may not need as many digits. :D

I know the old battle wagons don't fit modern naval tactics, but they sure were menacing and beautiful ships. So much more impressive looking than any other ship.

I love the photo of the broadside on the prior page. Note the wake running perpendicular to the bow and the rest of the hull. I always heard the recoil of a full broadside would push the entire ship in the opposite direction. You can see it right there in the photo.

Ooooookay, you asked for it!

Let's assume a 2,700 pound projectile at 2,500 fps:

2,700 lbs is 18,900,000 grains.

Times velocity squared would be:

262,278,520 ft-lbs


How do you like THEM apples?

:evil:


Oh, by the way...about that "wake":

I once used to believe that these images "proved" that such broadside actually shoved the battleships sideways like you're saying. But actually those battleships are so massive that this isn't what happens at all. Lateral movement in the water is very, VERY little and it shown mathematically if you care to google it. Essentially, the ship isn't moving sideways at all.

What you're seeing is the shockwave from the muzzle blasts as it ripples across the water and along the hull.
 
It's not just the 16-inch guns - the 5-inch guns are firing too. See the smoke and little rings of fire in the center of the photo?
 
Kabal said:
Are US soldiers fed similar fairy tales in basic training?

Well there was the one about "Do 20 years and you'll get medical benefits for life...." :rolleyes:

Seriously, the biggest myth I run into is the idea that just pointing agun at someone will make them back down.
 
I always get a laugh in the movies when a group of cops, soldiers, whatever stumble upon a bad guy and they all, simultaneously, cock their weapons with much noise, and much "badness".

Really, not one of them already had a round in the chamber? Who chases people like that? More importantly, who writes this drivel? :barf:
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top