Dream A Little Bigger, Darling - the Inception Fic Writer's Guide to Firearms, Pt 2
I'm very surprised and happy at the warm reception I got from fans, after posting Pt 1 of the tutorial. Unfortunately I suspect people may not be as happy this time around, as I'm going to touch on topics that are not for the delicate of sensibilities. This one has less picspam, but I think you'll all be thankful for it. I will put more gun diagrams up once I'm home from school; God knows what the system admins are thinking of all the search engine hits for firearms coming off my Wi-Fi use.
Edit: Gun diagrams up, firearms example links expanded, sections on head injuries and sawn-off shotguns also expanded, rant about difference between clips and magazines expanded on with helpful graphic.
The Icky Part: Wound Ballistics
This is probably where the faint-of-heart want to look away, as I will explain briefly here what gunshot wounds do and do not do, and why they do what they do.
Another Hollywood Guns Disclaimer: Now there’s a popular trope in Hollywood, where someone gets shot and they fly backwards. That does not happen. The gun simply does not generate enough force to send a human-sized target flying backwards, and if it did, it’d do similar things to the person shooting it. Note that this does not happen in Inception. Whenever someone is shot, they crumple to the ground, their knees buckling, or they fall forward or backward. Thank you so much, Christopher Nolan.
Now that we’re done with that, I can actually start talking about gunshot wounds and why center of mass matters so much to people who use guns.
Extra-special Disclaimer With Sprinkles On Top: I am not a medical professional, please for the love of $DEITY do not ever ever use this as a guide to first aid for gunshot wounds. This is for fic writing. Fanfiction. All clear?
The Instant-Death Gunshot
Most of the time when someone’s shot they don’t die instantly. They have at least one to two minutes of function left, although said function will probably be impaired by pain, blood loss, and growing loss of consciousness as the timer ticks down and they continue to bleed. That doesn’t mean they don’t fold instantly, though, as shock and pain can actually cause someone to faint outright after they’re hit.
About the only times you’ll see a gunshot kill someone instantly is with a headshot that disrupts enough central nervous system function to just drop them like a puppet with its strings cut, or when there’s enough lead flying around to reduce someone to chunky salsa (as when Eames pulled a grenade launcher). A specific spot often aimed for when using headshots is the brainstem - the sweet spot right where the involuntary bodily functions are controlled. Damage that bit enough, and the heart and breathing stop. Good night, Gracie.
For an example of someone continuing to fight after taking a wound that would have been eventually fatal, check out the FBI Miami Shootout. One of the robbers, Michael Platt, had taken a shot that had penetrated his chest, the bullet stopping an inch away from his heart. He kept shooting. It would have killed him eventually, but adrenaline and fitness can contribute a lot to someone staying up and shooting after a shot that will kill them eventually.
Note: In Inception the projections all die instantly after being hit. No exceptions. Including Cobb's projection of Mal. I wonder if it's because they work differently from live dreamers in a shared dream.
What Gunshots Feel Like
Now, I’ve been fortunate enough to never have been shot at, or shot in my life. However, I have had friends who know second-hand what it is like (several gun-owner friends with second-hand sources, so on so forth), and this is what I’ve gathered from incessant questioning and chatting. (These hard gentlemen think my fascination with wound ballistics a little icky, but I keep telling them it’s writing research.)
Initially a gunshot feels like a hard punch - you stagger, but it doesn’t stop you. If you’re keyed up enough with an adrenaline rush you may not even feel the pain as you’re too focused on survival. I’ve read accounts of folks not knowing they were bleeding from a gunshot wound until they felt the warmth of their blood trickling down their body, and then holy shit I’m bleeding I’m dying.
In Inception this effect is made visually apparent as Arthur does his status check of everyone in the cab as they’re getting the hell out of Dodge. Saito doesn’t say anything, but he feels wetness running down his shirt, puts his fingers to his chest, and blood. It takes him the rest of the ride for the pain to kick in past the adrenaline, and for him to become incapacitated.
After that brief lag time, it hurts like a bitch, like one would expect it to, and we all can write hurting like a bitch - just shut your finger in the door a few times and multiply it by a lot.
The Human Body And What Causes It To Cease Working
The human metabolism runs on oxygen; that’s what allows our cells to produce ATP which is pretty much fuel for the entire metabolic process. Cause a shortage of that oxygen and the electron transport chain in the mitochondria to shut down, which leads to cell death, which, eventually, leads to death. (Please don’t hurt me, Biology majors, I’m trying to be brief here.)
There are generally two or three ways to cause that critical oxygen shortage when gunshot wounds are involved; blood loss, cessation of breathing, or brain injuries so severe that the autonomous functions of the body don’t work any more.
When a bullet goes through someone it basically punches a hole through their body. Sometimes the round even comes out the other side. The hole where the bullet goes in is called the entry wound and the one that comes out the back is the exit wound. People are full of important things; bones, which are load-bearing structures from which the muscles exert leverage; organs, which do important organ things, and blood vessels, which hold the blood in our body. Our blood is the transport system for oxygen, and if you bleed too much, you die.
The damage a bullet does isn’t just from shredding the tissue in its path; bullets sometimes fragment, mushroom wider or tumble when moving from the medium of air to the medium of … well, meat, which has a different resistance. This brings us to our next section, which is:
Cavitation
Cavitation is a fancy wound ballistics term for the hole a bullet makes in a person when it goes through them. There are two kinds of cavities - permanent cavities and temporary ones. The permanent cavity is the one I described above - the hole a bullet punches in someone, through vital organs and blood vessels. The temporary cavity, however, is made from displaced flesh stretching from the pressure wave of the bullet.
The degrees to which both permanent and temporary cavitation occur depends on the round you’re using. Bullets don’t so much cut tissue as much as crush it. A jacketed round will only crush the tissue in its path; a hollowpoint, designed to expand as it hits flesh, is going to make a larger hole in the poor sap it’s hit, which means more stopping power, which I’ll explain further down.
Center of Mass
There is a shooter euphemism, center of mass, which basically refers to aiming for the chest/torso area of a target. It’s large, harder to miss than the head, and contains all sorts of yummy things such as heart, lungs, liver, the spleen, major blood vessels such as the hepatic artery, the pulmonary vein, the aortic arch and the descending aorta. Shooters go for center of mass because the goal in shooting someone is to drop them - to negate whatever threat they may present to the shooter, before it does happen.
Shots to the center of mass, such as the hit Saito takes to the chest, can be almost-immediately fatal if you get the heart, which causes so much circulatory disruption that the brain stops getting enough oxygen and the victim passes out from anoxia shortly. Or it can miss a vital organ, deflect off a rib, and make a nasty flesh wound that’ll take a lot of stitching and antibiotics but isn’t anything fatal.
Or it can be anything in between, as with Saito’s lung shot. Punching a hole in a lung leads to bleeding in the chest cavity and air leaking out of the lung, which is very bad. The lungs are basically compressed, unable to expand, by the fluid and air trapped in the chest cavity. The victim is effectively drowning in his own blood. In the case of air, it is called a pneumothorax, and in the case of blood it’s called hemothorax. If you have both as in Saito’s case it’s a hemopneumothorax. Get the bleeding/air leak going long enough and it can start putting pressure on the heart, preventing it from filling and pumping adequately.
There is also cardiac tamponade, where fluid (in this case, blood) fills the pericardium, the sac in which the heart rests, and compresses it to the point of not being able to beat.
And then there’s the more garden variety shock and bleeding that comes from a major blood vessel (or enough smaller blood vessels) being damaged. The blood loss causes hypovolemia, which inhibits the body’s ability to transport oxygen, which eventually leads to that metabolic process being disrupted, and death.
If you’re writing fic where someone gets shot you really don’t need to know all these terms; I just want you to know that shooting someone in center of mass does a variety of things, and not the same things all the time.
Load-Bearing Bones
Another way a shot can drop someone is by making it impossible for them to come after you; you can break a leg bone or an arm bone with a gunshot, and as much as you can hope to move with a broken limb, it’s not going to bear the weight of whatever you’re doing. Mind you, this is not anything any professional or competent self-defense shooter would do because it’s, really, a crapshoot. You could break his lower leg, yeah, or you could give him a hole in the calf and he’d just be pissed-off and wanting to kill you, or if he falls over he could draw a gun and still shoot you. Center of mass is where you aim for the vast majority of cases, because the point is to negate the threat they are posing to you.
Another way bones can make gunshot wounds interesting is that bullets can in fact glance off bones and continue spending their kinetic energy in a different direction; you could shoot someone in say, for comedic effect, the butt. The bullet could lodge in their butt and be easily removed by a professional, or it could bounce off their pelvis, angle upwards, go through their lower intestine and nick their liver and stomach before coming to a stop, in which case: enjoy your colostomy bag, dude.
Boom Headshot
Headshots are uncommon unless you’re very, very good, and they kill the target by, well, turning his brain into strawberry jelly. Not all headshots are fatal; the face has a lot of bony structures in it that can absorb the impact of a weaker round, and sometimes the bullet penetrates the head but doesn’t perforate the skull. Another example from the FBI Miami shootout; the first two shots that Special Agent Mireles fired at William Matix hit him, but did not sufficiently penetrate through the skull to cause a brain injury that would have dropped him. Subsequent shots penetrated through to actually sever his spinal cord, which eventually ended the gunfight.
Special Note On Headshots: Someone mentioned the case of Phineas Gage as evidence that someone could survive a shot to the head. That's rare, but not absolutely unheard-of. Sometimes the bullet just fails to penetrate vital parts of the brain, as in the case of James Brady, shot during the '81 assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan.
However, these cases are very rare, and even Brady has suffered permanent paralysis. The human brain is soft and sort of jelly-like, and the cavitation effect can reduce it to mush. Not to mention if the bullet fails to exit the skull (as in Arthur's case in the beginning of Inception) chances are that the bullet has bounced around on the inside of the skull at least once, shredding even more brain matter.
Moreover, after the initial injury the brain continues to swell against the skull, and that does even more damage; surgeons can try to say, remove a portion of the skull to relieve the cranial pressure, but if there's any kind of lag time between them being shot and the neurosurgeon cracking their head open, their chances start dropping precipitously. And this analysis doesn't even take into account the massive amounts of bleeding that can come from brain injuries, because of the blood vessels feeding the brain.
So headshots are, generally, not a very good thing for a character and even if they survive the prognosis is poor and will probably involve either a persistent vegetative state or lifelong disability.
Gunshots Are Not Pretty
When a bullet goes into someone the hole’s fairly straightforward. When it comes out is a completely different matter. Due to tumbling, fragmentation and cavitation the exit wound is almost always bigger than the entry wound, and usually really ugly and messy, too. In the case of head shots, you either get an entry wound and the bullet lodges in the skull, or an exit wound… which usually blows most of the opposite side of the head off, with a spray of blood, brains and bone fragments on surfaces behind them. Ick.
In Inception Arthur gets shot in the head in the dream so he can escape, and the bullet hole is almost absurdly neat, with a little bit of blood. That’s not entirely inaccurate, as I assumed his heart stopped beating before he could bleed enough to actually make a mess, and the shot didn’t exit out the back of his head. Plus, they’re in a dream, and Nolan wanted to keep a PG-13 rating.
Medical Matters
As you can see from all this stuff above, gunshot wounds are serious business, and characters digging after the bullet with a bottle of vodka and a knife are probably going to do more damage than the shot did, even if it’s just a flesh wound. A hit to center of mass with multiple organs compromised is going to need a hospital, and trauma surgery, and attentive first aid and triage care so they don’t die on the way to the hospital.
I know you like the idea of Eames nursing Arthur back to health after he gets shot, and hot sexings afterwards, but if you want to do that please make it a glancing flesh wound, like, a grazing wound to the bicep that can be stitched up and kept clean, instead of multiple fucking hits to the torso, I swear, these people aren’t Wolverine, they don’t have healing factors.
Jacketed Rounds versus Hollowpoints versus Frangible Rounds
If I actually started talking about all the different types of ammunition you’d be finding all around I’d be writing until 2011. Instead, I’m going to write about the three main types you’re going to be interested in for the purposes of fic writing.
Jacketed Rounds
Fully jacketed rounds basically have the lead encased in a harder metal, either on all sides, or leaving the rear as exposed lead. This tends to mean less wear on the barrel of the gun and less deformation of the bullet as it hits a person, but it doesn’t mean that FMJ is inferior, damage-wise, compared to hollowpoints. For example, the 5.56x45mm NATO round tends to tumble vertically on impact, creating a nasty, nasty cavity. The Hague Convention forbids the use of explosive, poisoned or expanding bullets, so most militaries use FMJ rounds.
Hollowpoints
A hollowpoint bullet has a pit or a divot cut out of the tip so that it mushrooms outwards after it hits flesh. There are two reasons for the mushrooming being desirable. Firstly, it creates a larger wound channel and disrupts more tissue as it travels through the target, dropping them faster. Secondly, hollowpoints are less likely to overpenetrate the target and come out the other side; useful if you’re shooting in an apartment room or an airplane, where a shot going through the drywall or fuselage could be very, very bad indeed.
Frangible Rounds
These are designed to break up into lots of little pieces on hitting a target, often for purposes of range safety or for use on an airplane by, say, air marshals. The wound channels created by such rounds are generally quite wide, but penetration may be a problem if they fragment too early.
Stopping Power
Stopping power is a shorthand term for how quickly and well a given round drops a target where it stands. It's ... it's talked about, but it's honestly a bitch to quantify, and generally one has to take into account the amount of blood loss or nervous system damage inflicted by a shot.
Rifles are generally going possess more "stopping power" than any handgun simply because the rounds they are chambered for do more damage. Rifle rounds are more likely to compromise structural integrity (break bones), more likely to cause grievous wounds to internal organs, more likely to leave big, deep wound channels (bleeding). Rifle rounds can also achieve brutal cavitation effects that handgun rounds can only dream of.
Similarly a shotgun slug is going to do catastrophic things to the insides on a center-of-mass hit, and buckshot generates lots of wound channels, but doesn't work quite as well against opponents wearing body armor. A shotgun to the face, however, is a recipe for a closed-casket funeral.
A rough ranking of the handgun cartridges I have listed in Part 1 of this tutorial goes as such, in order of most stopping power to the least: .44 Magnum, .45 ACP, .40 S&W, .357 Magnum (the last two roughly equal), then 9mm, .38 Special (9mm and .38 Special are also roughly equal), .380 ACP.
This list isn't set in stone; a lot of the time a round's stopping power varies depending on the quality and type of the round and how it's loaded - how many grains of gunpowder, so on so forth. Those are all technical matters that I don't think are necessary for the purposes of this tutorial.
Types of Guns
Handguns
Handguns are firearms designed to be held and operated with one hand (which doesn’t make one-handed shooting a good idea, just a possibility.) Modern handguns come in two flavors; semiautomatic pistols and revolvers.
Revolvers
A revolver holds the cartridges in the cylinder part of the gun; the holes in which the bullets rest are called chambers. There are two general kinds of actions for revolvers - single action and double action. A single action revolver has to have its hammer cocked after every shot is fired. A double action revolver does not.
Examples of a single action revolver: The Colt SA Army, “The gun that won the West”.
Examples of a double action revolver: Most modern revolvers, including the Ruger Redhawk.
None of the characters in Inception uses a revolver, although they are still very popular for self-defense due to ease of use and reliability. One thing of note: the most powerful handgun cartridges are still revolver designs due to the unfeasibility of fitting a cartridge that size in the magazine of a semiautomatic pistol, as the magazine has to fit in the grip, which has to accommodate a human hand.
The cons of the revolver are slow reload - even a speedloader is slower than just slapping a fresh magazine into the mag well of your Hi-Power, plus, it holds only six shots. The FBI switched from revolvers to semiauto pistols in the fallout from the Miami shootout because agents who had been wounded in the hand could not reload their sidearms and were thus sitting ducks in the gunfight.
Semiautomatic Pistols
A semi-automatic pistol uses the leftover energy from a fired shot to load another round in the chamber. The rounds are fed upwards from the magazine, and the movement of the gun’s slide feeds them into the chamber after the brass leaves the ejection port (where the spent casings leave the gun.)
Semi-automatic pistols come in three very general types; single action (SA), double action (DA) and double action only (DAO).
A single action semi-auto has to be cocked first by operating the slide, or, if there is already a round in the chamber, by cocking the hammer manually.
Examples: The 1911, the Browning Hi-Power, the Beretta 1934, the CZ-52 and the Tokarev.
Double-action semi-automatic pistols may either be thumb-cocked, manually, or activated by pulling the trigger manually for the first shot.
Examples: The SIG P220 and its siblings, the CZ-75, the Makarov, the H&K USP and the IMI Jericho.
DAO semi-auto pistols lack the option of thumb-cocking the hammer; once a round is chambered each trigger pull will cock the hammer, drop the firing pin and reload the chamber in one motion.
Examples: The Taurus PT 24/7, the H&K USP (it can be converted from one type of action to another.)
Gun owners are a little vociferous about which kind of action they prefer; I, for one, am a fan of the classic 1911, which is a SA semi-auto, because the trigger pull on an uncocked double-action semi-auto is something hideous.
Special Note On Magazines: The thing that goes in the grip of the semi-auto that holds the bullets is a magazine, not a clip. A clip is something entirely different that doesn’t really enter the scope of this tutorial, although if you ask, I will tell you. Gun owners feel their teeth itch when people refer to magazines as clips. They are magazines. MAGAZINES. Got it?
Extra-Special Note On Clips And Magazines, On Request
Several folks have asked me the difference between a clip and a magazine. Here's a very quick, simple answer. A clip is a little piece of metal that holds several cartridges together for loading in a gun with an internal box magazine, like the Mosin-Nagant and the Mauser Broomhandle.
A magazine is a little spring-loaded box, and you push your cartridges into it and put it in the mag well of your gun, and when you fire it the action of the gun feeds a new round into the chamber from the magazine.
And that, my friends, is why gun owners cringe when you refer to a magazine as a "clip".
Special Notes On Tupperware, uh, Glocks
Glocks are… an interesting case. They are not true DAO weapons because the action of the gun does not work off of a hammer; instead, an internal striker is cocked by the first motion of the slide, and the trigger pull fires and reloads and resets the striker. I’m not entirely fond of them. I personally think that Arthur would be the perfect man except he likes Glocks, that pervert. He actually does manage to pull off a double-tap with one despite the monstrous trigger pull, however, which tells us that he spends a lot of time squeezing on things to build hand strength. Your perverted minds can fill out the rest.
Submachine Guns
The submachine gun is a small carbine designed to fire pistol rounds, combining the automatic fire of a rifle with a compact size. Informally they’re known as “room brooms” for their use in close-quarters SWAT or hostage rescue room-clearing. Automatic fire weapons are basically ones that keep firing as long as the trigger is pulled, as opposed to the single shot per trigger pull of semi-automatic actions. Weapons that you can basically “pray and spray” with. The H&K MP5 is a fine example of a submachine guns; other examples include the Uzi , the Škorpion vz. 61, the Steyr TMP, the Mac-10.
Most automatic fire weapons also have select-fire - where you can switch from single shot to a burst (two or three shots) to full-auto, usually with a switch on the firearm itself.
I like using SMGs in Inception fics where the crew need more firepower but still need to be discreet; usually the H&K MP5 because it’s so ubiquitious, and because Heckler and Koch have a particular make of the MP5, the MP5K, which is a short version of the SMG without a shoulder stock. There is an optional carrying case for the MP5K that it can be fired from - no shit. You brace the briefcase against your belly and pull the trigger in the handle of the briefcase, and you start shooting.
Shotguns
A shotgun is a firearm designed to be fired from the shoulder, firing shells packed with shot, or solid slugs. One of the big things about a shotgun is that its bore is smooth; that is, its barrel lacks the rifling that imparts the spin to a bullet that keeps its trajectory stable. While a handgun or a rifle is designed to punch one large hole, or several large holes consecutively in a target, the shotgun peppers them with ball bearings driven fast enough to turn them into hamburger.
Shotguns come with several kinds of actions. The most popular are break-action, pump-action, lever-action and semi-automatic.
Break-action shotguns are the classic hunting fowling pieces. You swing the barrel open on hinges, open up the breech, and reload from there.
Pump-action shotguns have a sliding forearm handle (aforementioned pump) which works the action, ejecting the spent shotgun shell and loading a new one while simultaneously cocking the hammer.
Examples: Remington 870, the Franchi SPAS-12, the Mossberg 500, the Ithaca Model 37.
Lever-action shotguns use a lever located around the trigger-guard area to work the action of the gun. If you’ve watched Terminator 2 you may remember Arnie swinging his lever-action shotgun on the lever’s hinge to work its action. That is impossible in real life. The action is stiff enough, and the gun heavy enough, that you’re more likely to break your fingers than to reload it. Looks cool, though.
Examples: Winchester Model 1901.
Semi-automatic shotguns work off a similar action as semiautomatic pistols, except they’re loading shotgun shells instead of pistol cartridges. As you can imagine those things are excellent rapid-fire room-clearers.
Examples: The Benelli M1014, the Ithaca Mag-10, the Izhmash Saiga-12, the Franchi SPAS-12 (it also appears under the pump-action list because it is dual-mode and can have its action worked both ways.)
None of the named characters in Inception uses a shotgun, but they’re excellent room-clearing and urban-fighting weapons because of their short range, wide spread and their ability to chew people up quite horribly. The main disadvantage of a shotgun is they don’t do very well against armored opponents (unless you’re firing solid slugs as described previously in the ammunition section), poor range, and abysmal spread at the limits of its range.
Special Notes On Sawn-Off Shotguns: The sawn-off shotgun is what you get when you modify a regular shotgun to have a shorter barrel, and often take off its stock. This generally gives you a weapon with shorter range, a wider spread of shot, and increased concealability. It may also lead to loss of shell capacity if the tubular magazine under the barrel is shortened, as well.
As one can imagine, sawn-off shotguns are even more of a close-range weapon than the average shotgun, because of the wider spread and reduced range. One of the subconscious projections in the city level of Inception actually pulls a sawn-off shotgun - the one riding pillion on the motorcycle.
The legality of sawn-off shotguns, like most other firearms, depends on nation, state, and jurisdiction.
Rifles
A rifle is a firearm designed to be fired from the shoulder, like a shotgun. What gives it its name and makes it different is the rifling in the barrel, a series of spiraling cuts in the metal designed to make the bullet spin as it exits the gun, stabilizing its flight and trajectory. Rifles are the kings of firearms, really, despite the amount of attention handguns get in movies and the media.
I’m only going to list rifles I imagine the crew are likely to use; no historical oddities. Sorry.
Bolt-action rifles are the classic hunting rifles; the action is worked by opening and closing the breech manually by working a lever - the bolt, basically. It has been outpaced by semi-automatic and selective-fire weapons, but remains the dominant design in sniper rifles. The Weatherby Mk V is a good example of one, as are the Winchester Model 70, and the Mosin-Nagant. Simo Häyhä logged about 500 confirmed kills in the Winter War using a Mosin-Nagant, and terrifyingly enough he did so with iron sights (that is, without the use of a scope). Damned scary Finn, him.
Carbines are shorter, lighter-weight select-fire rifles, easier to handle in close-quarter fighting, especially in jungles, urban areas, and while deploying. They possess a shorter effective range than their full-size siblings. The M4 is an example of a carbine, as are the Ruger Mini-14 the SKS and the H&K G36C.
Assault rifles are rifles that use selective fire, usually the standard weapon of a military type. The FN SCAR-L Arthur uses in the warehouse is an assault rifle (his has the optional scope that allows him to snipe with it, albeit not at true sniper ranges.) Other assault rifles are the M16, the Steyr AUG, the AK-47, the FAMAS the H&K G3 and G11, the IMI Galil and the SA-80, which is proof that anything the Americans can screw up, the British can screw up better (worse).
Sniper rifles
Sniper rifles are rifles made and calibrated for extreme range and accuracy; anyone can use an assault rifle on single-shot or burst, with a scope, and take out someone at a decent distance, like Arthur does in the warehouse. Sniper rifles, on the other hand, laugh at the ranges Arthur's SCAR-L achieves. They are designed expressly so you can reach out, and really touch someone. There’s a lot of glamour and mythos around sniping; most of which I’ll discuss further on in the techniques and drills section.
Many sniper rifles are custom-made for their users, and there are always arguments about whether bolt-action or semi-auto is better, the H&K PSG-1 is a good example of a sniper rifle that you can buy, stock, from a supplier. Another is the Dragunov, the Blaser R93 LRS2 that Cobb uses in the third dream level and an oddity that I desperately want to use in an Inception fic, the suppressed VSS Vintorez.
Rare and Unusual Guns
Some fic writers like to stick unusual guns in their fics, which can screw around with suspension of disbelief when you go, “Where the hell did he get that thing? There’s maybe sixty of those in the world.”
This is not a problem in this fandom, hell, it’s almost canon in Inception because you can plausibly pull out anything in a dream. For example, Arthur’s FN SCAR-L is actually very, very rare; so far only 200 SCARs have been issued for use, and the L variant has been discontinued.
Just do your research on the gun in question, and if you’re including a rarity, don’t get too carried away. Otherwise it starts looking like a gun collector’s catalog.
Why The Desert Eagle Sucks
A lot of folks think the Desert Eagle is the epitome of cool when it comes to gunporn. This is where I shatter your innocent illusions. The Desert Eagle is the signature gun of the armchair mall ninja - someone who likes “tactical” stuff without actually knowing much at all.
This thing weighs four and a half pounds unloaded. Add ammunition and magazines and you’d probably get more killing for the weight if you carried an M4 carbine around. It’s also huge, which means you need big hands to hold it effectively, hard to carry concealed, and has monstrous recoil. If you want a character to carry a gun that loads a big round like .50 AE, I recommend one of the big revolvers, like a Ruger Super Redhawk.
Next will be holstering, techniques and drills, realistic gunfights as opposed to Hollywood, legality, and my observations on the characters of Inception and their guns.
EDIT: Part 3 is up!
- Mel
Edit: Gun diagrams up, firearms example links expanded, sections on head injuries and sawn-off shotguns also expanded, rant about difference between clips and magazines expanded on with helpful graphic.
The Icky Part: Wound Ballistics
This is probably where the faint-of-heart want to look away, as I will explain briefly here what gunshot wounds do and do not do, and why they do what they do.
Another Hollywood Guns Disclaimer: Now there’s a popular trope in Hollywood, where someone gets shot and they fly backwards. That does not happen. The gun simply does not generate enough force to send a human-sized target flying backwards, and if it did, it’d do similar things to the person shooting it. Note that this does not happen in Inception. Whenever someone is shot, they crumple to the ground, their knees buckling, or they fall forward or backward. Thank you so much, Christopher Nolan.
Now that we’re done with that, I can actually start talking about gunshot wounds and why center of mass matters so much to people who use guns.
Extra-special Disclaimer With Sprinkles On Top: I am not a medical professional, please for the love of $DEITY do not ever ever use this as a guide to first aid for gunshot wounds. This is for fic writing. Fanfiction. All clear?
The Instant-Death Gunshot
Most of the time when someone’s shot they don’t die instantly. They have at least one to two minutes of function left, although said function will probably be impaired by pain, blood loss, and growing loss of consciousness as the timer ticks down and they continue to bleed. That doesn’t mean they don’t fold instantly, though, as shock and pain can actually cause someone to faint outright after they’re hit.
About the only times you’ll see a gunshot kill someone instantly is with a headshot that disrupts enough central nervous system function to just drop them like a puppet with its strings cut, or when there’s enough lead flying around to reduce someone to chunky salsa (as when Eames pulled a grenade launcher). A specific spot often aimed for when using headshots is the brainstem - the sweet spot right where the involuntary bodily functions are controlled. Damage that bit enough, and the heart and breathing stop. Good night, Gracie.
For an example of someone continuing to fight after taking a wound that would have been eventually fatal, check out the FBI Miami Shootout. One of the robbers, Michael Platt, had taken a shot that had penetrated his chest, the bullet stopping an inch away from his heart. He kept shooting. It would have killed him eventually, but adrenaline and fitness can contribute a lot to someone staying up and shooting after a shot that will kill them eventually.
Note: In Inception the projections all die instantly after being hit. No exceptions. Including Cobb's projection of Mal. I wonder if it's because they work differently from live dreamers in a shared dream.
What Gunshots Feel Like
Now, I’ve been fortunate enough to never have been shot at, or shot in my life. However, I have had friends who know second-hand what it is like (several gun-owner friends with second-hand sources, so on so forth), and this is what I’ve gathered from incessant questioning and chatting. (These hard gentlemen think my fascination with wound ballistics a little icky, but I keep telling them it’s writing research.)
Initially a gunshot feels like a hard punch - you stagger, but it doesn’t stop you. If you’re keyed up enough with an adrenaline rush you may not even feel the pain as you’re too focused on survival. I’ve read accounts of folks not knowing they were bleeding from a gunshot wound until they felt the warmth of their blood trickling down their body, and then holy shit I’m bleeding I’m dying.
In Inception this effect is made visually apparent as Arthur does his status check of everyone in the cab as they’re getting the hell out of Dodge. Saito doesn’t say anything, but he feels wetness running down his shirt, puts his fingers to his chest, and blood. It takes him the rest of the ride for the pain to kick in past the adrenaline, and for him to become incapacitated.
After that brief lag time, it hurts like a bitch, like one would expect it to, and we all can write hurting like a bitch - just shut your finger in the door a few times and multiply it by a lot.
The Human Body And What Causes It To Cease Working
The human metabolism runs on oxygen; that’s what allows our cells to produce ATP which is pretty much fuel for the entire metabolic process. Cause a shortage of that oxygen and the electron transport chain in the mitochondria to shut down, which leads to cell death, which, eventually, leads to death. (Please don’t hurt me, Biology majors, I’m trying to be brief here.)
There are generally two or three ways to cause that critical oxygen shortage when gunshot wounds are involved; blood loss, cessation of breathing, or brain injuries so severe that the autonomous functions of the body don’t work any more.
When a bullet goes through someone it basically punches a hole through their body. Sometimes the round even comes out the other side. The hole where the bullet goes in is called the entry wound and the one that comes out the back is the exit wound. People are full of important things; bones, which are load-bearing structures from which the muscles exert leverage; organs, which do important organ things, and blood vessels, which hold the blood in our body. Our blood is the transport system for oxygen, and if you bleed too much, you die.
The damage a bullet does isn’t just from shredding the tissue in its path; bullets sometimes fragment, mushroom wider or tumble when moving from the medium of air to the medium of … well, meat, which has a different resistance. This brings us to our next section, which is:
Cavitation
Cavitation is a fancy wound ballistics term for the hole a bullet makes in a person when it goes through them. There are two kinds of cavities - permanent cavities and temporary ones. The permanent cavity is the one I described above - the hole a bullet punches in someone, through vital organs and blood vessels. The temporary cavity, however, is made from displaced flesh stretching from the pressure wave of the bullet.
The degrees to which both permanent and temporary cavitation occur depends on the round you’re using. Bullets don’t so much cut tissue as much as crush it. A jacketed round will only crush the tissue in its path; a hollowpoint, designed to expand as it hits flesh, is going to make a larger hole in the poor sap it’s hit, which means more stopping power, which I’ll explain further down.
Center of Mass
There is a shooter euphemism, center of mass, which basically refers to aiming for the chest/torso area of a target. It’s large, harder to miss than the head, and contains all sorts of yummy things such as heart, lungs, liver, the spleen, major blood vessels such as the hepatic artery, the pulmonary vein, the aortic arch and the descending aorta. Shooters go for center of mass because the goal in shooting someone is to drop them - to negate whatever threat they may present to the shooter, before it does happen.
Shots to the center of mass, such as the hit Saito takes to the chest, can be almost-immediately fatal if you get the heart, which causes so much circulatory disruption that the brain stops getting enough oxygen and the victim passes out from anoxia shortly. Or it can miss a vital organ, deflect off a rib, and make a nasty flesh wound that’ll take a lot of stitching and antibiotics but isn’t anything fatal.
Or it can be anything in between, as with Saito’s lung shot. Punching a hole in a lung leads to bleeding in the chest cavity and air leaking out of the lung, which is very bad. The lungs are basically compressed, unable to expand, by the fluid and air trapped in the chest cavity. The victim is effectively drowning in his own blood. In the case of air, it is called a pneumothorax, and in the case of blood it’s called hemothorax. If you have both as in Saito’s case it’s a hemopneumothorax. Get the bleeding/air leak going long enough and it can start putting pressure on the heart, preventing it from filling and pumping adequately.
There is also cardiac tamponade, where fluid (in this case, blood) fills the pericardium, the sac in which the heart rests, and compresses it to the point of not being able to beat.
And then there’s the more garden variety shock and bleeding that comes from a major blood vessel (or enough smaller blood vessels) being damaged. The blood loss causes hypovolemia, which inhibits the body’s ability to transport oxygen, which eventually leads to that metabolic process being disrupted, and death.
If you’re writing fic where someone gets shot you really don’t need to know all these terms; I just want you to know that shooting someone in center of mass does a variety of things, and not the same things all the time.
Load-Bearing Bones
Another way a shot can drop someone is by making it impossible for them to come after you; you can break a leg bone or an arm bone with a gunshot, and as much as you can hope to move with a broken limb, it’s not going to bear the weight of whatever you’re doing. Mind you, this is not anything any professional or competent self-defense shooter would do because it’s, really, a crapshoot. You could break his lower leg, yeah, or you could give him a hole in the calf and he’d just be pissed-off and wanting to kill you, or if he falls over he could draw a gun and still shoot you. Center of mass is where you aim for the vast majority of cases, because the point is to negate the threat they are posing to you.
Another way bones can make gunshot wounds interesting is that bullets can in fact glance off bones and continue spending their kinetic energy in a different direction; you could shoot someone in say, for comedic effect, the butt. The bullet could lodge in their butt and be easily removed by a professional, or it could bounce off their pelvis, angle upwards, go through their lower intestine and nick their liver and stomach before coming to a stop, in which case: enjoy your colostomy bag, dude.
Boom Headshot
Headshots are uncommon unless you’re very, very good, and they kill the target by, well, turning his brain into strawberry jelly. Not all headshots are fatal; the face has a lot of bony structures in it that can absorb the impact of a weaker round, and sometimes the bullet penetrates the head but doesn’t perforate the skull. Another example from the FBI Miami shootout; the first two shots that Special Agent Mireles fired at William Matix hit him, but did not sufficiently penetrate through the skull to cause a brain injury that would have dropped him. Subsequent shots penetrated through to actually sever his spinal cord, which eventually ended the gunfight.
Special Note On Headshots: Someone mentioned the case of Phineas Gage as evidence that someone could survive a shot to the head. That's rare, but not absolutely unheard-of. Sometimes the bullet just fails to penetrate vital parts of the brain, as in the case of James Brady, shot during the '81 assassination attempt on President Ronald Reagan.
However, these cases are very rare, and even Brady has suffered permanent paralysis. The human brain is soft and sort of jelly-like, and the cavitation effect can reduce it to mush. Not to mention if the bullet fails to exit the skull (as in Arthur's case in the beginning of Inception) chances are that the bullet has bounced around on the inside of the skull at least once, shredding even more brain matter.
Moreover, after the initial injury the brain continues to swell against the skull, and that does even more damage; surgeons can try to say, remove a portion of the skull to relieve the cranial pressure, but if there's any kind of lag time between them being shot and the neurosurgeon cracking their head open, their chances start dropping precipitously. And this analysis doesn't even take into account the massive amounts of bleeding that can come from brain injuries, because of the blood vessels feeding the brain.
So headshots are, generally, not a very good thing for a character and even if they survive the prognosis is poor and will probably involve either a persistent vegetative state or lifelong disability.
Gunshots Are Not Pretty
When a bullet goes into someone the hole’s fairly straightforward. When it comes out is a completely different matter. Due to tumbling, fragmentation and cavitation the exit wound is almost always bigger than the entry wound, and usually really ugly and messy, too. In the case of head shots, you either get an entry wound and the bullet lodges in the skull, or an exit wound… which usually blows most of the opposite side of the head off, with a spray of blood, brains and bone fragments on surfaces behind them. Ick.
In Inception Arthur gets shot in the head in the dream so he can escape, and the bullet hole is almost absurdly neat, with a little bit of blood. That’s not entirely inaccurate, as I assumed his heart stopped beating before he could bleed enough to actually make a mess, and the shot didn’t exit out the back of his head. Plus, they’re in a dream, and Nolan wanted to keep a PG-13 rating.
Medical Matters
As you can see from all this stuff above, gunshot wounds are serious business, and characters digging after the bullet with a bottle of vodka and a knife are probably going to do more damage than the shot did, even if it’s just a flesh wound. A hit to center of mass with multiple organs compromised is going to need a hospital, and trauma surgery, and attentive first aid and triage care so they don’t die on the way to the hospital.
I know you like the idea of Eames nursing Arthur back to health after he gets shot, and hot sexings afterwards, but if you want to do that please make it a glancing flesh wound, like, a grazing wound to the bicep that can be stitched up and kept clean, instead of multiple fucking hits to the torso, I swear, these people aren’t Wolverine, they don’t have healing factors.
Jacketed Rounds versus Hollowpoints versus Frangible Rounds
If I actually started talking about all the different types of ammunition you’d be finding all around I’d be writing until 2011. Instead, I’m going to write about the three main types you’re going to be interested in for the purposes of fic writing.
Jacketed Rounds
Fully jacketed rounds basically have the lead encased in a harder metal, either on all sides, or leaving the rear as exposed lead. This tends to mean less wear on the barrel of the gun and less deformation of the bullet as it hits a person, but it doesn’t mean that FMJ is inferior, damage-wise, compared to hollowpoints. For example, the 5.56x45mm NATO round tends to tumble vertically on impact, creating a nasty, nasty cavity. The Hague Convention forbids the use of explosive, poisoned or expanding bullets, so most militaries use FMJ rounds.
Hollowpoints
A hollowpoint bullet has a pit or a divot cut out of the tip so that it mushrooms outwards after it hits flesh. There are two reasons for the mushrooming being desirable. Firstly, it creates a larger wound channel and disrupts more tissue as it travels through the target, dropping them faster. Secondly, hollowpoints are less likely to overpenetrate the target and come out the other side; useful if you’re shooting in an apartment room or an airplane, where a shot going through the drywall or fuselage could be very, very bad indeed.
Frangible Rounds
These are designed to break up into lots of little pieces on hitting a target, often for purposes of range safety or for use on an airplane by, say, air marshals. The wound channels created by such rounds are generally quite wide, but penetration may be a problem if they fragment too early.
Stopping Power
Stopping power is a shorthand term for how quickly and well a given round drops a target where it stands. It's ... it's talked about, but it's honestly a bitch to quantify, and generally one has to take into account the amount of blood loss or nervous system damage inflicted by a shot.
Rifles are generally going possess more "stopping power" than any handgun simply because the rounds they are chambered for do more damage. Rifle rounds are more likely to compromise structural integrity (break bones), more likely to cause grievous wounds to internal organs, more likely to leave big, deep wound channels (bleeding). Rifle rounds can also achieve brutal cavitation effects that handgun rounds can only dream of.
Similarly a shotgun slug is going to do catastrophic things to the insides on a center-of-mass hit, and buckshot generates lots of wound channels, but doesn't work quite as well against opponents wearing body armor. A shotgun to the face, however, is a recipe for a closed-casket funeral.
A rough ranking of the handgun cartridges I have listed in Part 1 of this tutorial goes as such, in order of most stopping power to the least: .44 Magnum, .45 ACP, .40 S&W, .357 Magnum (the last two roughly equal), then 9mm, .38 Special (9mm and .38 Special are also roughly equal), .380 ACP.
This list isn't set in stone; a lot of the time a round's stopping power varies depending on the quality and type of the round and how it's loaded - how many grains of gunpowder, so on so forth. Those are all technical matters that I don't think are necessary for the purposes of this tutorial.
Types of Guns
Handguns
Handguns are firearms designed to be held and operated with one hand (which doesn’t make one-handed shooting a good idea, just a possibility.) Modern handguns come in two flavors; semiautomatic pistols and revolvers.
Revolvers
A revolver holds the cartridges in the cylinder part of the gun; the holes in which the bullets rest are called chambers. There are two general kinds of actions for revolvers - single action and double action. A single action revolver has to have its hammer cocked after every shot is fired. A double action revolver does not.
Examples of a single action revolver: The Colt SA Army, “The gun that won the West”.
Examples of a double action revolver: Most modern revolvers, including the Ruger Redhawk.
None of the characters in Inception uses a revolver, although they are still very popular for self-defense due to ease of use and reliability. One thing of note: the most powerful handgun cartridges are still revolver designs due to the unfeasibility of fitting a cartridge that size in the magazine of a semiautomatic pistol, as the magazine has to fit in the grip, which has to accommodate a human hand.
The cons of the revolver are slow reload - even a speedloader is slower than just slapping a fresh magazine into the mag well of your Hi-Power, plus, it holds only six shots. The FBI switched from revolvers to semiauto pistols in the fallout from the Miami shootout because agents who had been wounded in the hand could not reload their sidearms and were thus sitting ducks in the gunfight.
Semiautomatic Pistols
A semi-automatic pistol uses the leftover energy from a fired shot to load another round in the chamber. The rounds are fed upwards from the magazine, and the movement of the gun’s slide feeds them into the chamber after the brass leaves the ejection port (where the spent casings leave the gun.)
Semi-automatic pistols come in three very general types; single action (SA), double action (DA) and double action only (DAO).
A single action semi-auto has to be cocked first by operating the slide, or, if there is already a round in the chamber, by cocking the hammer manually.
Examples: The 1911, the Browning Hi-Power, the Beretta 1934, the CZ-52 and the Tokarev.
Double-action semi-automatic pistols may either be thumb-cocked, manually, or activated by pulling the trigger manually for the first shot.
Examples: The SIG P220 and its siblings, the CZ-75, the Makarov, the H&K USP and the IMI Jericho.
DAO semi-auto pistols lack the option of thumb-cocking the hammer; once a round is chambered each trigger pull will cock the hammer, drop the firing pin and reload the chamber in one motion.
Examples: The Taurus PT 24/7, the H&K USP (it can be converted from one type of action to another.)
Gun owners are a little vociferous about which kind of action they prefer; I, for one, am a fan of the classic 1911, which is a SA semi-auto, because the trigger pull on an uncocked double-action semi-auto is something hideous.
Special Note On Magazines: The thing that goes in the grip of the semi-auto that holds the bullets is a magazine, not a clip. A clip is something entirely different that doesn’t really enter the scope of this tutorial, although if you ask, I will tell you. Gun owners feel their teeth itch when people refer to magazines as clips. They are magazines. MAGAZINES. Got it?
Extra-Special Note On Clips And Magazines, On Request
Several folks have asked me the difference between a clip and a magazine. Here's a very quick, simple answer. A clip is a little piece of metal that holds several cartridges together for loading in a gun with an internal box magazine, like the Mosin-Nagant and the Mauser Broomhandle.
A magazine is a little spring-loaded box, and you push your cartridges into it and put it in the mag well of your gun, and when you fire it the action of the gun feeds a new round into the chamber from the magazine.
And that, my friends, is why gun owners cringe when you refer to a magazine as a "clip".
Special Notes On Tupperware, uh, Glocks
Glocks are… an interesting case. They are not true DAO weapons because the action of the gun does not work off of a hammer; instead, an internal striker is cocked by the first motion of the slide, and the trigger pull fires and reloads and resets the striker. I’m not entirely fond of them. I personally think that Arthur would be the perfect man except he likes Glocks, that pervert. He actually does manage to pull off a double-tap with one despite the monstrous trigger pull, however, which tells us that he spends a lot of time squeezing on things to build hand strength. Your perverted minds can fill out the rest.
Submachine Guns
The submachine gun is a small carbine designed to fire pistol rounds, combining the automatic fire of a rifle with a compact size. Informally they’re known as “room brooms” for their use in close-quarters SWAT or hostage rescue room-clearing. Automatic fire weapons are basically ones that keep firing as long as the trigger is pulled, as opposed to the single shot per trigger pull of semi-automatic actions. Weapons that you can basically “pray and spray” with. The H&K MP5 is a fine example of a submachine guns; other examples include the Uzi , the Škorpion vz. 61, the Steyr TMP, the Mac-10.
Most automatic fire weapons also have select-fire - where you can switch from single shot to a burst (two or three shots) to full-auto, usually with a switch on the firearm itself.
I like using SMGs in Inception fics where the crew need more firepower but still need to be discreet; usually the H&K MP5 because it’s so ubiquitious, and because Heckler and Koch have a particular make of the MP5, the MP5K, which is a short version of the SMG without a shoulder stock. There is an optional carrying case for the MP5K that it can be fired from - no shit. You brace the briefcase against your belly and pull the trigger in the handle of the briefcase, and you start shooting.
Shotguns
A shotgun is a firearm designed to be fired from the shoulder, firing shells packed with shot, or solid slugs. One of the big things about a shotgun is that its bore is smooth; that is, its barrel lacks the rifling that imparts the spin to a bullet that keeps its trajectory stable. While a handgun or a rifle is designed to punch one large hole, or several large holes consecutively in a target, the shotgun peppers them with ball bearings driven fast enough to turn them into hamburger.
Shotguns come with several kinds of actions. The most popular are break-action, pump-action, lever-action and semi-automatic.
Break-action shotguns are the classic hunting fowling pieces. You swing the barrel open on hinges, open up the breech, and reload from there.
Pump-action shotguns have a sliding forearm handle (aforementioned pump) which works the action, ejecting the spent shotgun shell and loading a new one while simultaneously cocking the hammer.
Examples: Remington 870, the Franchi SPAS-12, the Mossberg 500, the Ithaca Model 37.
Lever-action shotguns use a lever located around the trigger-guard area to work the action of the gun. If you’ve watched Terminator 2 you may remember Arnie swinging his lever-action shotgun on the lever’s hinge to work its action. That is impossible in real life. The action is stiff enough, and the gun heavy enough, that you’re more likely to break your fingers than to reload it. Looks cool, though.
Examples: Winchester Model 1901.
Semi-automatic shotguns work off a similar action as semiautomatic pistols, except they’re loading shotgun shells instead of pistol cartridges. As you can imagine those things are excellent rapid-fire room-clearers.
Examples: The Benelli M1014, the Ithaca Mag-10, the Izhmash Saiga-12, the Franchi SPAS-12 (it also appears under the pump-action list because it is dual-mode and can have its action worked both ways.)
None of the named characters in Inception uses a shotgun, but they’re excellent room-clearing and urban-fighting weapons because of their short range, wide spread and their ability to chew people up quite horribly. The main disadvantage of a shotgun is they don’t do very well against armored opponents (unless you’re firing solid slugs as described previously in the ammunition section), poor range, and abysmal spread at the limits of its range.
Special Notes On Sawn-Off Shotguns: The sawn-off shotgun is what you get when you modify a regular shotgun to have a shorter barrel, and often take off its stock. This generally gives you a weapon with shorter range, a wider spread of shot, and increased concealability. It may also lead to loss of shell capacity if the tubular magazine under the barrel is shortened, as well.
As one can imagine, sawn-off shotguns are even more of a close-range weapon than the average shotgun, because of the wider spread and reduced range. One of the subconscious projections in the city level of Inception actually pulls a sawn-off shotgun - the one riding pillion on the motorcycle.
The legality of sawn-off shotguns, like most other firearms, depends on nation, state, and jurisdiction.
Rifles
A rifle is a firearm designed to be fired from the shoulder, like a shotgun. What gives it its name and makes it different is the rifling in the barrel, a series of spiraling cuts in the metal designed to make the bullet spin as it exits the gun, stabilizing its flight and trajectory. Rifles are the kings of firearms, really, despite the amount of attention handguns get in movies and the media.
I’m only going to list rifles I imagine the crew are likely to use; no historical oddities. Sorry.
Bolt-action rifles are the classic hunting rifles; the action is worked by opening and closing the breech manually by working a lever - the bolt, basically. It has been outpaced by semi-automatic and selective-fire weapons, but remains the dominant design in sniper rifles. The Weatherby Mk V is a good example of one, as are the Winchester Model 70, and the Mosin-Nagant. Simo Häyhä logged about 500 confirmed kills in the Winter War using a Mosin-Nagant, and terrifyingly enough he did so with iron sights (that is, without the use of a scope). Damned scary Finn, him.
Carbines are shorter, lighter-weight select-fire rifles, easier to handle in close-quarter fighting, especially in jungles, urban areas, and while deploying. They possess a shorter effective range than their full-size siblings. The M4 is an example of a carbine, as are the Ruger Mini-14 the SKS and the H&K G36C.
Assault rifles are rifles that use selective fire, usually the standard weapon of a military type. The FN SCAR-L Arthur uses in the warehouse is an assault rifle (his has the optional scope that allows him to snipe with it, albeit not at true sniper ranges.) Other assault rifles are the M16, the Steyr AUG, the AK-47, the FAMAS the H&K G3 and G11, the IMI Galil and the SA-80, which is proof that anything the Americans can screw up, the British can screw up better (worse).
Sniper rifles
Sniper rifles are rifles made and calibrated for extreme range and accuracy; anyone can use an assault rifle on single-shot or burst, with a scope, and take out someone at a decent distance, like Arthur does in the warehouse. Sniper rifles, on the other hand, laugh at the ranges Arthur's SCAR-L achieves. They are designed expressly so you can reach out, and really touch someone. There’s a lot of glamour and mythos around sniping; most of which I’ll discuss further on in the techniques and drills section.
Many sniper rifles are custom-made for their users, and there are always arguments about whether bolt-action or semi-auto is better, the H&K PSG-1 is a good example of a sniper rifle that you can buy, stock, from a supplier. Another is the Dragunov, the Blaser R93 LRS2 that Cobb uses in the third dream level and an oddity that I desperately want to use in an Inception fic, the suppressed VSS Vintorez.
Rare and Unusual Guns
Some fic writers like to stick unusual guns in their fics, which can screw around with suspension of disbelief when you go, “Where the hell did he get that thing? There’s maybe sixty of those in the world.”
This is not a problem in this fandom, hell, it’s almost canon in Inception because you can plausibly pull out anything in a dream. For example, Arthur’s FN SCAR-L is actually very, very rare; so far only 200 SCARs have been issued for use, and the L variant has been discontinued.
Just do your research on the gun in question, and if you’re including a rarity, don’t get too carried away. Otherwise it starts looking like a gun collector’s catalog.
Why The Desert Eagle Sucks
A lot of folks think the Desert Eagle is the epitome of cool when it comes to gunporn. This is where I shatter your innocent illusions. The Desert Eagle is the signature gun of the armchair mall ninja - someone who likes “tactical” stuff without actually knowing much at all.
This thing weighs four and a half pounds unloaded. Add ammunition and magazines and you’d probably get more killing for the weight if you carried an M4 carbine around. It’s also huge, which means you need big hands to hold it effectively, hard to carry concealed, and has monstrous recoil. If you want a character to carry a gun that loads a big round like .50 AE, I recommend one of the big revolvers, like a Ruger Super Redhawk.
Next will be holstering, techniques and drills, realistic gunfights as opposed to Hollywood, legality, and my observations on the characters of Inception and their guns.
EDIT: Part 3 is up!
- Mel