Armed and Dangerous: A Writer's Guide to Weapons Howdunit Series

165 Pages·2012·1.79 MB·English

by  Newton

Armed and Dangerous
A Writer’s Guide to Weapons
BY MICHAEL NEWTON
Sanger, California
TheWriteThought.com

Thanks to Jim Hamby for his careful reading of the manuscript and invaluable
advice and comments; and to Sturm, Ruger & Company, Inc., of Southport,
Connecticut, and Hammond, Incorporated, of Maplewood, New Jersey, for
permissions to reprint the illustrations that appear at the back of the book.
Armed and Dangerous: A Writer’s Guide to Weapons. Copyright © 1990 by Michael Newton.
All rights reserved. No part of this book—except for short passages for comment and review purposes—
may be reproduced in any form by any means, electronic, digital or mechanical, including photocopying
and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system without the written permission of the
publisher:
The Write Thought, Inc.
1254 Commerce Way
Sanger, California 93657
559-876-2170
[email protected]
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Kindle ISBN 978-1-61809-001-0
ePub ISBN 978-1-61809-002-7
Paperback ISBN 978-1-61809-003-4
Newton, Michael
Armed and dangerous : a writer’s guide to weapons / by Michael Newton.
p. cm. Includes bibliographical references.
1. Firearms—United States—History. 2. Firearms—History. 3. Explosives, Military—History. 4.
Firearms in literature. 5. Explosives, Military, in literature. 6. Adventure stories—Authorship. I. Title.
TS533.2.N49 1990—
683.4’00973—dc20 90-12070
CIP
Contents
Fatal Attraction
Tools of Ill Omen
How the West Was Really Won
America at War
Behind Enemy Lines
Cops and Robbers
Licensed to Kill
Reign of Terror
Whodunit?
Sporting Arms
Ground Zero
Appendix A:
A Selective Chronology of Firearms Development
Appendix B:
Comparative Handgun Ballistics Information
Appendix C:
Comparative Trajectories of Rifle Cartridges
Firearms Glossary
Bibliography
You will acquire a deep understanding of that ancient Christian moral
principle, as applied to aimed fire, “It is better to give than to
receive.”
—George Prosser, Black Politics, 1968
There’s nothing wrong with shooting, as long as the right people get
shot.
—“Dirty Harry” Callahan
ONE
Fatal Attraction
G
uns made this country what it is today.
Too strong, perhaps? Let’s check our history.
From colonial times to the space age, firearms have been an integral part of
American culture. Our nation’s very independence was a matter for debate until
some nervous, nameless farmer stood on Concord bridge and fired a shot heard
’round the world. “Old Betsy,” Davy Crockett’s rifle, was as famous as her
owner in the battle for the Alamo. Guns tamed the wild frontier (or stole it from
the Mexicans and Indians, depending on your point of view), and in another
generation, automatic weapons made the Twenties roar. When the crew of
Apollo 11 touched down on the moon, they were armed—just in case.
Despite our protestations to the contrary, Americans have been historically
combative, fighting nine great wars and countless smaller conflicts in the past
213 years (including an invasion of the Soviet Union, at Archangel, in 1920).
Twenty-three of forty U.S. presidents had military records, all but one of them in
wartime; four saw combat in successive wars, and three were wounded by the
enemy.
It may not be precisely true, as Mao Tse-tung suggested, that political power
grows from the barrel of a gun, but firearms have frequently altered the course of
American government. President Lincoln’s assassination in 1865 doomed any
hopes of a Civil War cease-fire “with malice toward none,” leaving radical
Republicans in firm control of reconstruction. (Ten years later, other weapons in
the hands of Ku Klux Klansmen and the White Leagues would restore a
Democratic “solid South.”) The murder of President Mc-Kinley placed Teddy
Roosevelt in the White House, thereby inaugurating the progressive era, and
gunshots in Dallas slammed the door on Camelot in 1963, obliterating plans for
early withdrawal from Vietnam. In 1968 and 1972, presidential front-runners
were gunned down in their prime, dramatically revising campaign strategies, and
leaving millions of Americans without a candidate to call their own.
As guns have made their mark on history, for good or ill, so they have crept
into our common speech. Familiar idioms remind us we should keep our powder
dry and caution us against the risk of going off half-cocked. Honest persons are
square shooters, while their reckless counterparts are loose cannons, tending to
shoot from the hip. If bad news must be tendered, we prefer to take it point-
blank, right between the eyes.
Our love affair with lethal hardware carries over into entertainment. Feature
films are dedicated to historic firearms [Winchester ’73), their inventors
(Carbine Williams), and the individuals who used them in pursuit of gold or
glory. Action heroes are defined by their selection of specific weapons, to the
point that retail markets are affected. In the early 1970s, the popularity of Dirty
Harry tripled prices on the Smith and Wesson .44 Magnum revolver; ten years
later, terrorists and cocaine cowboys learned about the Ingram submachine gun
from McQ and other movies, taking on the little “room broom” as their own.
Regardless of your personal opinions on the subject, be they hard line NRA or
something more akin to actress Sally Struthers (“traumatized” by the
requirement that she fire a pistol in the course of a performance), any writer who
observes the marketplace must recognize that firearms play a major role in
modern fiction. Cover art is only half the story here. Unless you’re writing pure
romance, science fiction, or epic fantasy, odds are that someone in your story
will be packing heat. And if you’re doing genre work—historical or Western
novels, mysteries, police procedurals, war stories or action/adventure—you will
simply have to make your peace with guns. Case closed.
Considering the role that firearms play in modern fiction, it is scandalous to
view their handling by authors—major names included—who adopt facades of
expertise. I’m not discussing philosophical attitudes toward gun control, but
rather technical mistakes and flagrant nonsense which reveal an author’s
ignorance for all to see. A few examples: • In The Family, a novel of the Mafia,
author Leslie Waller arms a platoon of security guards with .44 Magnum
revolvers, each holding seven rounds in its cylinder, capable of “disemboweling
a man at 200 yards.” The .44 and several other large revolvers, hold a maximum
of six rounds, although there are handguns that offer the increased capacity.
• In Robert R. McCammon’s Stinger (and a host of other novels published
through the years), assorted heroes check, recheck and double-check the safety
mechanisms on their .38 revolvers—safeties that exist only on some revolvers
manufactured in this century.
• Adventure writer Mark K. Roberts, in his novel Jakarta Coup, describes a
Soviet AK-47 assault rifle spitting out 5.56mm bullets, when, in point of fact,
the weapon uses the larger-sized 7.62mm ammunition.
• Another veteran action writer, Adam Lassiter, interrupts his novel Triangle
with a description of the dual “firing handles” on an M-60 machine gun. Anyone
who’s ever seen the weapon knows the 60 only has one “handle” (except for the
M-60D model); Lassiter’s description properly applies to Maxim-style machine
guns from the First World War and certain heavy pieces manufactured at a later
date.
• Douglas Fairbairn, in his novel Shoot, describes a principal character’s
private gun collection, including Uzi submachine guns, which have been
converted to chamber the 7.62mm NATO round.
It sounds impressive, but the plain fact is that submachine guns are designed
to handle pistol ammunition; larger rifle cartridges won’t fit inside the
magazines, no matter how you modify the chamber.
• In The Evil That Men Do, Lance Hill presents a fine, authentic-sounding
portrait of a magnum-caliber revolver with a silencer attached. Unfortunately
(for the author’s credibility) it is impossible to completely “silence” a revolver;
Hill is literally blowing smoke.
• Stephen King plays fast and loose with his hardware in his novel The Dark
Tower II: The Drawing of the Three. In the space of five pages, he grafts double
triggers onto a Remington slide-action shotgun and discourses at length on the
uncontrollable recoil of the M-16 rifle—a weapon specifically designed for
minimal kick.
• At the other end of the scale, a manuscript submitted to (and rejected by)
Gold Eagle Books described a hero trying to wound himself in the side, for
appearance’s sake, with a .44 Magnum. Concerned that the bullet may pass
through his body and sink the boat in which he’s hiding, our macho man solves
the problem by placing a pillow behind his back!
Enough, already. There are several explanations for the prevalence of
nonsense in descriptive passages involving weapons and firearms identification.
One is simple ignorance, which translates into lack of homework. Authors who
have problems with their spelling commonly resort to dictionaries (or the
spelling programs sold for their computers) to avoid embarrassment.
Professionals concerned about the accuracy of their work should find it no more
difficult to check out firearms facts—or any other subject—prior to putting
words on paper.
Fiction writers, incidentally, are not the only ones who put their ignorance of
firearms on display. In his biography of “Baby Face” Nelson (Monarch, 1962),
Steve Thurman describes the 1930s outlaw as an expert with the .357 Magnum
—a weapon invented the year after Nelson’s death. And in The Bad Ones
(Fawcett, 1968), Lew Louderback describes another desperado’s final moments
thus: “Ma Barker’s weapon, a Lewis .300 gas-operated automatic rifle, lay
across her body. It was still hot. Forty of its ninety-four rounds were gone.”