![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Trigger Guard
7 December 2024 03:56 pmIn The Before Times, I would do science, technology, and history presentations at steampunk conventions and one of the topics I would cover was firearms. The history, focusing on their rapid development through the 19th Century, the technology, and the general functioning of them geared towards informing writers, gamers, and prop makers so that they would get them right. I was inspired by having read something by Stephen King and having him refer to a “30-ought-6 Shotgun.”
Brrrrr.
Having made the move to BlueSky (link). . . and, before moving on just let me say that if you are still on Twitter, “Get out! Get out of there.” Elon Musk has turned it into a fascistic cesspool of hate and disinformation and there is virtually nothing to be gained in sticking around. And, while I haven’t deleted my account because there are still a handful of posters that are still there that I want to see, I have deleted all my posts and engage only with those few people that I care about. Once they abandon the platform for BlueSky, I will then delete my account altogether. BlueSky is a much better platform, has a much better community, and there are far fewer Fudds under the GunSky.
Anyway, back to our scheduled program.
On BlueSky, I quickly found author Chris Grall (link) and his recent book “Trigger Guard: A Writer’s Guide to Firearms” (link). Let me just get the “review” part out of the way, if you are a writer that’s writing about guns without extensive prior experience, you will want to have this book. If you are a writer that’s writing about guns with prior experience, you will want to have this book. If you are a non-writer and just want a good introduction to guns and how they work, you will want to read this book. There’s a gazillion books on the market, but this one presents guns in an accessible and easily-digestible way that most of the others do not. My companion is looking to purchase a handgun and I am going to recommend she read this book.
As it relates to my presentation, I like how the book splits up the topics. The first iteration of my presentation tried to go through firearms development in the 19th Century more chronologically and wasn’t as good as it could have been. The next version broke it up more thematically and showed more improvement. Grall sets the topics out a little better and, when I finally get back to presenting at conventions again, I am going to emulate that staging a little more.
Grall, as I do in my presentation, starts with why it’s important to get these sorts of things right in a work of fiction or even pure fantasy. Mixing up clip with a magazine can be overlooked, even by a gun nitpicker like me, because colloquial mis-usage is a thing, but if you refer to a shotgun as being a 30-06, it breaks my suspension of disbelief and starts me thinking that you don’t know what you are talking about. And if you don’t know what you are talking about in that, what might you be talking out your ass about in other topics? I see the gun mistakes, but someone else will see the other mistakes and you will loose him, too. Write what you know, and if you don’t know, look it up and reference someone who does know. I’ve had people ask if I was a mountain climber or if I was from Chicago based on what I had written. No, but I did my research.
Now, what comes next in this is not a criticism. I am not nitpicking Grall about things he got wrong, but there are a few points I want to elaborate on because they relate more to my presentation as I present it.
At the end of his chapter on revolvers, and just before he gets into automatic pistols, Gall states “The Webley-Fosbery is the only semi-automatic revolver ever created.” The 1895 Webley-Fosbery is, indeed, an oddball where the whole top of the gun (barrel, frame, and cylinder) racks back with recoil to rotate the cylinder, cock the hammer, and prepare for the next shot. It may be the first semi-auto revolver manufactured or produced in any numbers, it it was not the first semi-automatic.
I give you U.S. Patent 39,825, the 1863 Mershon & Hollingsworth self cocking revolver.
Instead of using recoil or some of the propellant gas to cycle the action, the frame has a coil spring that you wind up in advance like a clock so that when you fire the gun, the spring then rotates the cylinder and cocks the gun, preparing for the next pull of the trigger (link)
But also, the 1855 Mershon & Hollingsworth percussion revolving rifle. Select fire and full auto. (link)
Neither gun actually qualifies as an automatic firearm because neither uses the firing of the gun to load the next round, either with recoil or gas operation, in the same way that the Gatling doesn’t qualify either. Also, there was only ever one revolver produced as a patent model so Grall wouldn’t include it, but I am doing steampunk and so the oddest of oddballs MUST be included.
Because Grall focuses on modern guns, he mentions but does not expand on a “feature” of black powder and the way it would affect 19th Century gunfight narratives.
Smoke.
Before the widespread use of smokeless powder at the very end of the 19th Century, firearms produced a lot of smoke. And because most movies use smokeless powder for their gunfights so that you, the audience, can see what’s going on, people don’t realize just how much smoke there would be and the effect it would have. I show a video of a Cowboy Action Shooting stage in the Frontiersman division shooting all black powder.
From there, I segue into the Gunfight at the OK Coral and show a clip of that fight from the movie “Tombstone”. After that, I tell them that historically it wasn’t a big open space as in the movie but was a close-in alleyway, perhaps 4 yards across, with 9 men and two horses. All in a space the size of a large living room. Now imagine the obscuring smoke from the first video, multiplied.
Basically everyone emptied the guns they had, 30 shots in less than 30 seconds. Virgil was hit once in the calf, Morgan was hit once across the back, Doc was hit once but the bullet was stopped by a buckle. Wyatt wasn’t hit at all.
On the other side, Ike Clanton, Billy Clayborn, and Wes Fuller, unarmed, fled the scene. Tom McLaury, reaching over his horse for a scabbarded rifle, took a hit under his arm at about 10 feet from Doc’s borrowed shotgun. He ran down Fremont street a ways before expiring. Frank was gut shot but then, moving out into the street while still firing, was shot in the head. Billy Clanton was shot in the wrist, chest, and abdomen and died shortly after.
A 20% hit ratio is pretty comparable to modern gunfights.
The reported 30 seconds seems like a very long time. Based on recreations I have seen I would think it to have been under 20 seconds, and maybe even closer to 10.
In my presentation, I cover other western movie tropes that are really myths.
Shooting someone with a shotgun will not blast them backwards because, you know, physics and equal-and-opposite reaction. Grall covers this one as well.
Shooting a lock is more likely to jam the jail cage or lockbox permanently rather than open it.
Shooting the hand or leg chains will not break them.
Shooting a hat doesn’t knock it off the man’s head, it just punches a hole right through (that is, unless his skull gets in the way).
If you shoot a rope hoping to cut it and save someone from being hung, the bullet will most likely just push the rope to one side, leaving you friend to swing.
Will shooting a stick of dynamite cause it to explode? Yes, actually, but it’s the instability of nitroglycerin and not the “hot lead” that does it. Bullets can be hot, but not “set things on fire” hot.
The standing in the middle of the street and drawing down on one another gunfight is a thing that didn’t really happen. Yea, maybe that one time at the beginning of Wild Bill Hickock’s fame with Davis Tutt over a pocket watch (a 75 yard shot through the heart), but most gunfights were more like his end with Jack McCall shooting Bill in the back of the head (at point blank).
And, of course, when your shot over penetrates, the sun does not shine through the wound channel.
Grall goes over a few gunfights in his book and, if I ever get back to doing conventions I am going to expand on that a little bit. Not too much but to focus a little more on how shit went down so when people write steampunk gunfights, they are better.
So, anyway, read his book and maybe I’ll see you at the convention after next.
Brrrrr.
Having made the move to BlueSky (link). . . and, before moving on just let me say that if you are still on Twitter, “Get out! Get out of there.” Elon Musk has turned it into a fascistic cesspool of hate and disinformation and there is virtually nothing to be gained in sticking around. And, while I haven’t deleted my account because there are still a handful of posters that are still there that I want to see, I have deleted all my posts and engage only with those few people that I care about. Once they abandon the platform for BlueSky, I will then delete my account altogether. BlueSky is a much better platform, has a much better community, and there are far fewer Fudds under the GunSky.
Anyway, back to our scheduled program.
On BlueSky, I quickly found author Chris Grall (link) and his recent book “Trigger Guard: A Writer’s Guide to Firearms” (link). Let me just get the “review” part out of the way, if you are a writer that’s writing about guns without extensive prior experience, you will want to have this book. If you are a writer that’s writing about guns with prior experience, you will want to have this book. If you are a non-writer and just want a good introduction to guns and how they work, you will want to read this book. There’s a gazillion books on the market, but this one presents guns in an accessible and easily-digestible way that most of the others do not. My companion is looking to purchase a handgun and I am going to recommend she read this book.As it relates to my presentation, I like how the book splits up the topics. The first iteration of my presentation tried to go through firearms development in the 19th Century more chronologically and wasn’t as good as it could have been. The next version broke it up more thematically and showed more improvement. Grall sets the topics out a little better and, when I finally get back to presenting at conventions again, I am going to emulate that staging a little more.
Grall, as I do in my presentation, starts with why it’s important to get these sorts of things right in a work of fiction or even pure fantasy. Mixing up clip with a magazine can be overlooked, even by a gun nitpicker like me, because colloquial mis-usage is a thing, but if you refer to a shotgun as being a 30-06, it breaks my suspension of disbelief and starts me thinking that you don’t know what you are talking about. And if you don’t know what you are talking about in that, what might you be talking out your ass about in other topics? I see the gun mistakes, but someone else will see the other mistakes and you will loose him, too. Write what you know, and if you don’t know, look it up and reference someone who does know. I’ve had people ask if I was a mountain climber or if I was from Chicago based on what I had written. No, but I did my research.
Now, what comes next in this is not a criticism. I am not nitpicking Grall about things he got wrong, but there are a few points I want to elaborate on because they relate more to my presentation as I present it.
At the end of his chapter on revolvers, and just before he gets into automatic pistols, Gall states “The Webley-Fosbery is the only semi-automatic revolver ever created.” The 1895 Webley-Fosbery is, indeed, an oddball where the whole top of the gun (barrel, frame, and cylinder) racks back with recoil to rotate the cylinder, cock the hammer, and prepare for the next shot. It may be the first semi-auto revolver manufactured or produced in any numbers, it it was not the first semi-automatic.
I give you U.S. Patent 39,825, the 1863 Mershon & Hollingsworth self cocking revolver.
Instead of using recoil or some of the propellant gas to cycle the action, the frame has a coil spring that you wind up in advance like a clock so that when you fire the gun, the spring then rotates the cylinder and cocks the gun, preparing for the next pull of the trigger (link)
But also, the 1855 Mershon & Hollingsworth percussion revolving rifle. Select fire and full auto. (link)
Neither gun actually qualifies as an automatic firearm because neither uses the firing of the gun to load the next round, either with recoil or gas operation, in the same way that the Gatling doesn’t qualify either. Also, there was only ever one revolver produced as a patent model so Grall wouldn’t include it, but I am doing steampunk and so the oddest of oddballs MUST be included.
Because Grall focuses on modern guns, he mentions but does not expand on a “feature” of black powder and the way it would affect 19th Century gunfight narratives.
Smoke.
Before the widespread use of smokeless powder at the very end of the 19th Century, firearms produced a lot of smoke. And because most movies use smokeless powder for their gunfights so that you, the audience, can see what’s going on, people don’t realize just how much smoke there would be and the effect it would have. I show a video of a Cowboy Action Shooting stage in the Frontiersman division shooting all black powder.
From there, I segue into the Gunfight at the OK Coral and show a clip of that fight from the movie “Tombstone”. After that, I tell them that historically it wasn’t a big open space as in the movie but was a close-in alleyway, perhaps 4 yards across, with 9 men and two horses. All in a space the size of a large living room. Now imagine the obscuring smoke from the first video, multiplied.
Basically everyone emptied the guns they had, 30 shots in less than 30 seconds. Virgil was hit once in the calf, Morgan was hit once across the back, Doc was hit once but the bullet was stopped by a buckle. Wyatt wasn’t hit at all.
On the other side, Ike Clanton, Billy Clayborn, and Wes Fuller, unarmed, fled the scene. Tom McLaury, reaching over his horse for a scabbarded rifle, took a hit under his arm at about 10 feet from Doc’s borrowed shotgun. He ran down Fremont street a ways before expiring. Frank was gut shot but then, moving out into the street while still firing, was shot in the head. Billy Clanton was shot in the wrist, chest, and abdomen and died shortly after.
A 20% hit ratio is pretty comparable to modern gunfights.
The reported 30 seconds seems like a very long time. Based on recreations I have seen I would think it to have been under 20 seconds, and maybe even closer to 10.
In my presentation, I cover other western movie tropes that are really myths.
Shooting someone with a shotgun will not blast them backwards because, you know, physics and equal-and-opposite reaction. Grall covers this one as well.
Shooting a lock is more likely to jam the jail cage or lockbox permanently rather than open it.
Shooting the hand or leg chains will not break them.
Shooting a hat doesn’t knock it off the man’s head, it just punches a hole right through (that is, unless his skull gets in the way).
If you shoot a rope hoping to cut it and save someone from being hung, the bullet will most likely just push the rope to one side, leaving you friend to swing.
Will shooting a stick of dynamite cause it to explode? Yes, actually, but it’s the instability of nitroglycerin and not the “hot lead” that does it. Bullets can be hot, but not “set things on fire” hot.
The standing in the middle of the street and drawing down on one another gunfight is a thing that didn’t really happen. Yea, maybe that one time at the beginning of Wild Bill Hickock’s fame with Davis Tutt over a pocket watch (a 75 yard shot through the heart), but most gunfights were more like his end with Jack McCall shooting Bill in the back of the head (at point blank).
And, of course, when your shot over penetrates, the sun does not shine through the wound channel.
Grall goes over a few gunfights in his book and, if I ever get back to doing conventions I am going to expand on that a little bit. Not too much but to focus a little more on how shit went down so when people write steampunk gunfights, they are better.
So, anyway, read his book and maybe I’ll see you at the convention after next.
