Posts
The more I'm enjoying a series I'm bingeing, the more I notice shit they're getting wrong.
In this case, though, is Hollywood's deliberate ignorance in how gun laws work.
Time and time again a character waltzes into a pawn shop and, despite being a prohibited person, walks out with a firearm.
In this instance, a 9mm pistol with a suppressor!
I know that the NFA branch and the SilencerCo kiosks have sped things up but it's not same-day.
Which means the pawn shop owner would have to be committing a felony themselves by not doing a background check at all.
Hollywood either thinks that pawn shops don't do background checks or that they believe that every pawn shop just breaks the law and sells to felons without checking.
I'm honestly waiting for them to start doing the "he bought a 3-d printer and just printed the silenced submachine gun" thing :-) But yes... The pawn shop thing was one of the few things I seriously disliked about the "Reacher" second season...
ReplyDeleteI love it when TVFEDBOIs go to a case in Florida and say something stupid like "The gun used wasn't registered." No duh, duhass. There's no registration for guns in Florida. There is a registration for official FL concealed carry permits. But no actual gun registration, except for the ones various LEO have seized (and reported) in the state.
ReplyDeleteIt happens in literature, too. I liked Lawrence Block's "Bernie Rhodenbarr" novels, but bounced off his first "Hit Man" book---because the eponymous hit man was inconvenienced by having to buy his gun in a store, and deal with the three-day wait. I've thought about writing Mr. Block and pointing out that hit men do not buy their guns at gun stores, but on the black market.
ReplyDeleteNever mind that there really aren't specialized hit men in the Hollywood sense.
Delete"Of course Hollywood "gets it wrong".
ReplyDeleteThe word for it when every last detail recorded is exactly right is "documentary". - Steven Spielberg
My willing suspension of disbelief is getting very forced.
DeleteI watched the sausage being made for over twenty years.
DeleteMost times I'm trying to figure out where the camera was, how many set-ups it took them to get a given scene, and counting the number of times the boom mike dips into frame, or a reflection catches the camera/crew.
Seeing Twister in the theater when it came out, and watching a wide sweeping shot of midwestern cornfields zoom right up to the passenger window of Bill Paxton's pick-up truck, only to catch a Bell JetRanger flying alongside it clearly reflected in the bodywork, was like Christmas in July.
I lost track of how many times Justified tried (and failed) to sell SoCal - mainly Santa Clarita - as Appalachia when I binge-watched the entire series, which as Austin Powers noted also looks nothing like the English countryside.
When someone tells a story so well I stop noticing the glaring technical screw-ups and get sucked into the tale, I cheer. It's a rare event. In the 1960s, TV could get away with having semi-trailers in the distance as Rat Patrol fought Nazis outside Palmdale, Barstow, and 29 Palms. The audience isn't as gullible any more. But most writers and directors are simply too lazy to bother with the minutia, so the behind-the-scenes crew just goes along with the boss.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onMm0DLg8CE