They told me I was gullible... and I believed them.
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I watched "Blazing Saddles" on TV last night. Man, they bowdlerized the "Hell" out of it. Also the "ass", the "rape", the "Mormon", and the "nigger" out of it. Practically every tenth word, and every one of those words was necessary. It wasn't the same at all. Rape? Duh? The line was something like, "I rape and pillage and murder for fun", and it became "I .... and pillage and murder for fun". Since when is rape a worse word than murder?
Oh, well.
I was disappointed because I didn't see one particular scene I remembered that I loved. A bad guy pulls a gun on the hero, a few inches from his chest, and the hero calmly sticks his finger in the barrel. The look of disbelief on the bad guy's face is priceless. "Oh, $#!T ! Now what?!"
So I did some research today, and it turns out that scene is from a different movie. Walter Brennan pulled a gun on James Garner in "Support Your Local Sheriff", and Garner sticks his finger in it.
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0065051/]
My research led me to some forums in which people were arguing vociferously a) whether or not you could stick a finger in the barrel of anything smaller than a shotgun, and b) whether the buildup of compressed air thus created would really cause the gun to explode.
I was frustrated because they were so passionate about such a moot point. It doesn't matter whether it would or not. It only matters whether the shooter is absolutely *positive* it will not.
If a guy is pointing a gun at your chest from a foot away, you don't know for sure whether he's going to pull the trigger or not. You lose nothing by sticking your finger in the barrel, either way. He, on the literal other hand, now has a chance, a possibility, of losing his shootin' hand if he pulls the trigger. There's an element of surprise, and that can make all the difference.
So I wanted to ask those guys who insisted the gun would not explode - if you were going to shoot some guy, and he did that unexpectedly, would you pull the trigger without hesitation?
I am proud of myself for stomping my frustration and resisting the impulse to jump into the discussion. I doubt they'd get my point anyway.
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2 comments:
There was a Mythbusters episode where they explored the myth of the finger in the barrel of the gun. They used a ballistics gel hand.
I don't remember the outcome, but my son does. He just said that it made the barrel bulge a tiny bit but blew the hand apart completely. Looking for a video of the episode, but alas, I cannot find one, except for the cartoon introduction to it.
Yeah, Mythbusters was mentioned in the forum, and there were all kinds of arguments about that, too, that the type of gun, thickness of the barrel, type of bullet, and so on were not taken into consideration, blah blah. There were strong adherents on both sides of the theory. I doubt ANY experiment would change any minds.
But, like I said, it doesn't matter whether it will explode or not. It matters only what the shooter believes will happen, how confident he is that it won't explode.
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