Forum: Author Hangout

I'm surprised by how many stories here include characters who gather massive armories and how much exposition goes into the nitty-gritty details of the weaponry, which is very unfamiliar information to me and not especially interesting to me. Most countries don't allow people to have personal weapons on the scale that America does and even in America, only one person in 3 or 4 owns a gun.

So when a story goes into great detail about the relative merits of a P36 vs. a G37 and all the ammo loads and custom doodads on a gun, I wonder who that information is for. It's a gun, I get it. I assume it's going to be useful to the character and to the story at some point, but since I don't share the author's fascination with weaponry, I could kind of care less about all the buying information and technical details. I just kind of float through all that shit hoping that we'll get back to the story soon.

Some stories do this with cars or houses or boats, which not everyone cares so much about either, but at least most people live in some kind of housing and drive a car and maybe wish they had a boat, it makes more sense to me. I remember one story I read here when the author went on a 10-page tangent about what to look for when buying a used compressor. I guess the story and reader will wait for each other while the author indulges their personal obsession, but it does seem odd from time to time.

GUN PORN... When either their own "GUN" isn't larger enough or the owner is unable to "FIRE" it.

but since I don't share the author's fascination with weaponry, I could kind of care less about all the buying information and technical details.

If it does not float your boat, you are more than welcome to skip that section. I do not mind a short synopsis about what the rifles and pistols being procured, as long as the author is careful to make sure that the use of the weapon is correct.

For example, there have been some stories that made me shake my head in disbelief about someone taking a small caliber rifle hunting and then killing a large animal at 300 yards by shooting it in the eye. Or using a large caliber rifle to take something like a squirrel or rabbit using hollow point rounds and still having enough meat to fill a stew pot.

And those alien abduction stories are rife with long lists of weapons and tools being taken along. I tend to skip those long lists and get to the fun part of the story.

As for the compressor, maybe it played a significant part of the story? It might not have been the compressor, but the building of the relationship between buyer and seller that was important to the story?

Anyway, there is no one watching over your shoulder who says you have to read every part of every story. You can do what I sometimes do and just skip those parts that are repetitive.

Some stories do this with cars or houses or boats, which not everyone cares so much about either

Cars, houses (or architecture more generally), boats, or even guns, it can be a significant point of character development that a character in the story takes great interest in one or more of these things.

That said, unless it's a character trying to "educate" another character in the story, it's probably best to not get so deep into the weeds with it.

Most reader's won't appreciate that level of detail, and the few who do will hate you over the smallest mistakes.

I realize I can skip that stuff, but in stories written by people who love guns, there's usually a lot of it and it's annoying to tune out a lot of pages in a story you're otherwise interested in.

My point is, though, there aren't that many gun enthusiasts out there, percentage-wise, and you would think you'd want to be careful to go on at length on topics that only a small number of people care about.

If you think of James Bond, for example. This is a story that has some mass appeal and involves guns, but they don't go on and on and on about what gun he prefers for close quarters and what his favorite snipe rifle and how many guns he caries or about his gun safes. He's got a gun he likes and he carries it with him always, end of story. There's a balance between booze and women and cars and gadgets and exotic locations and gun volence. If Bond was as concerned over his guns the way some of these stories are, there would be a smaller audience. Even very gun-oriented movies and books in the mass-media world don't go into this level of loving detail.

I agree with the OP, to some extent. My problem is twofold. (1) The author is trying too hard to show how much an expert he is on weaponry, but his efforts are wasted on me. (2) Since I'm unfamilar with all except the most basic of weapons, and therefore have no understanding of what those weapons can do, it would help my understanding if the author would explain it to me, The Little Green Man From Mars when it comes to weapons. If you want it to have meaning to me, explain to me that a P36 (the sample the OP used) is great for shooting blue elephants five miles away, or that if your intent is to kill a mockingbird, the P36 is not powerful enough. Gimme something meaningful other than the model numbers.

Hunting snipes was a practical joke played on unsuspecting kids here in the western US and maybe other parts of the US. I misspent my youth in Oregon and California.

Hunting snipe involved going out at night to bag them and bring them back to camp. The "adults" would often go out into the field and make noises to scare the kids.

Unfortunately, I read a lot and ran into the concept before anyone attempted it on me. I just laughed and said some other time.

I live in a country where no personal guns are allowed and thus I know little to nothing about them. I actually learned a lot about fire arms reading those stories. I never knew the differences between the types of ammunition, caliber etc. Now I know that for a specific type of target you should use a specific type of gun with appropriate ammunition. Maybe the details go too far in some stories but it's still interesting to read about it.
One thing I miss in most of those stories is the need for ear protection. As I understand firing of a gun makes a lot of noise but you almost never read about the effects on the ears and hearing of a person, either shooter or by-stander. Most important: the effect on the play-out of the scene because of hearing problems.

Granted this is a wiki site, but they purport to show all guns used by Bond in both the books and movies.

Below I have pasted in the information on revolvers used.

http://jamesbond.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_firearms

In the movie "Live or Let Die", Smith & Wesson Model 29 .44 Magnum revolver, used during the rescue of Solitaire.

In the movie "Die Another Day", Smith & Wesson .38cal revolver, Bond borrowed the revolver from a fellow agent while in Cuba.

In the early books, several different revolvers were noted on this site.

Some of the people in the Signal Corps also have hearing loss, from the generators running 24/7 to keep the radios on line.

I think the big point is that the specifications for any gun, car, truck or other tech isn't needed for a story. Heck if I want the specifications or other technical information. I just copy the named item into a google search bar and look it up. I usually find the technical information I want easily enough.
Include customization if needed for the story but general specifications are easily looked up.
Sure architectural information such as building plans vary so much that line drawings that Earnest uses can be very useful.

But as a rule that type of data dump is not needed.

Most countries don't allow people to have personal weapons on the scale that America does and even in America, only one person in 3 or 4 owns a gun.

The trend in the USA (I do not recall the length of time) is for fewer and fewer persons to own more and more guns. If you read NRA propaganda, THEY are a threat who are coming for your guns and to rape your wife any day now. The people who actually hunt are decreasing in number and often have inherited their gun. They make a lousy market for guns.

I think it is the authors right to go into details of anything he or she presumes necessary. Or just because he or she just likes it. May it be a firearm, armory, car or the kitchen sink. It is a free story and I am just glad to be allowed to read it. I am capable of scrolling over it or just skip the story if I don't like it. I don't belief that any comment should be used as propaganda tool either.

That said, here is one thing I find too often and I would like to offer a correction: a Glock pistol has no external safety switch and a clip is not the same as a magazine (https://www.differencebetween.com/difference-between-clip-and-vs-magazine/). It might sound cool to say "...they switched the safety off on a pistol...", but that doesn't work for a Glock. And to load a clip into a regular pistol is not working either.

Anyway, I would like to thank any author who publishes their stories here. I don't expect perfection in punctuation, grammar or word selection. I appreciate any author doing their best to provide entertainment for us and that is good enough for me. And double thanks to all the editors for all their hard work.

In Central California, I remember pickups with gun racks in the back window in the school parking lot. One rack had a rifle with a scope and the other one usually had a shotgun or a fishing pole, depending on the season.

Ah, the early 70's are a lot different than these days. We all had access to guns. Fights usually involved calling names which might then escalate to fists.

And today they start with knives and escalate to machine pistols in many areas.

Sometimes they skip the knives completely and just shoot up the entire neighborhood for some perceived injustice.

Gun control laws are a joke. For that matter, so is any attempt to control the actions of violent criminals. By definition, a criminal breaks laws.

Anyone intent on killing another human or groups of humans for nefarious purposes (murder vs self defense), will find a tool to facilitate their crime. A semi truck into a crowd of people, a bomb in a subway, a box cutter turning a plane into a missile, a biologic hazard released in confined spaces, the list is only limited by the criminals imagination.

All the hand wringing, bluster, pseudo science PC babble in the world will not change that.

The premise that a killer can be reasoned with is just as insane as the broken mind that decided to kill to begin with. Box cutter, bomb, car, truck, gas, axe, knife, molotov cocktail, ball bat, what have you, it all comes down to the hands and minds that use those tools.

Bottom line it's the person, not the tool. Until the politicians and the societies that spawned them wake up to that fact, the killings will continue. The knee jerk reactions of social vultures... Umm politicians to ban anything will not change that fact.