Gun Movie FAILs

[Unlicensed Dremel]

I watched a sad excuse for a film called "The American" on Netflix, starring noted gun-hater (who makes a living off of movies showing guns & violence) G. Clooney.

Aside from being a bad movie, the gun-related mistakes were myriad and guffaw-inducing:

1. First, the client ordering the (ONE - wow, what a scary terrorist) gun from Clooney's character says she wants something tiny (she describes a size requirement of a PDW, say like a P90 or Kriss Super V) - the specs are this size, but with a range of 150-175 meters, and high capacity. Then the ultimate answer is a normal-sized Ruger Mini-14 which appears to be a 16" or longer barrel with a HUGE scope and scope rail - not at all compact enough to fit the requirements she asked for.... She wanted it very concealable - a Mini-14? And relatedly, she and Clooney act as if this is some difficult/ insane requirement that no one's ever heard of - even though an PDW-sized AR15 would work and have an effective range of 175 meters, I believe.
2. Next, he specifically calls the rifle an "M-14" when it's a Mini-14
3. Next, although she is supposedly some bad-arse assassin, she was completely unfamiliar with the Mini-14 - no experience with it at all, she said.
4. Next, he taps the barrel with threads for the homemade silencer, which is fine, but suddenly, in addition to the threading on the end, the rifle is also a takedown, where the barrel unscrews just in front of the receiver, to make it fit in a briefcase. Sorry, but I think the barrel is too thin to do that, and even if possible, no way he scrounged up the right tools to do this more complicated machining from the kid's auto mechanic garage.
5. Next, he starts grabbing components for the silencer from around the garage without even checking the sizes to see if the baffle components fit in the tube, for example (he just grabs parts, eyeballs them, and leaves). And toward the end of construction of the silencer, suddenly his tube had endcaps without showing how he made them go on - the tube was too thin to thread, I think.
6. The making of the mercury "exploding" bullets. So he took loaded ammo, ground down the end of each bullet, then drilled a hole, then filled the new hollow point with plain mercury. Not only would the mercury just round out once the round was tipped over since he didn't plug the hole after filling it, I'm pretty sure plain mercury isn't explosive.
7. And of course, the best (most absurd) for last: (SPOILER ALERT) Once he deduced that the client was actually on a mission to kill HIM with this weapon and ammo he was supplying, he somehow (inexplicably - not shown) took apart the Mini-14 and rigged it up somehow so that when the assassin/client loaded and fired a round, that it would actually fire backward into her face and kill her, which it did.... So how does this work? Even if we buy that the chamber could somehow chamber a round and fire backward, are we suppose to believe that he made it to where the magwell would only accept the magazine backward, with the rounds pointing backward, and she just flipped the mag around and loaded it up, thinking to herself "Hmmm, first rifle I've ever seen that the rounds point backward when loaded - must be some new-fangled feeding system." ?? Nevermind that the fired it previously when they met up to thoroughly test the rifle earlier.

Yeah, I was yelling at the screen. Hollyweird.

[Spats McGee]

Yes, Hollywood is wildly inaccurate in its depiction of firearms, their uses, and the laws surrounding them. However, just because a firearm appears in a movie, regardless of the inaccuracy of its portrayal, doesn't make a thread on the matter "gun-related."