Without Rick and Morty, Westworld, or Game of Thrones, Sunday nights are getting fairly thinned out with regards to binge worthy TV shows. Luckily we still have The Walking Dead, a great show that keeps fans watching every week because of the fantastic cast of characters living out the zombie apocalypse fantasy we all think about.
One of the key components of the show is the over indulgence of firearms. Makes sense, right? Zombie apocalypse would need plenty of nobodies to pack some heat to survive. Not everyone can be a bad ass with a crossbow or katana.
However, people who have actually seen a firearm cringe when they see how the weapons are actually portrayed.
Some things can be hand-waved away by the user being a idiot and no one correcting them in the apocalypse (I’m looking at you, everyone with sh*tty trigger discipline!).
Other times the writers throw in a spotlight piece of dialogue, such as when someone gets a headshot on a walker from maybe 500 yards and someone else says, “Wow! That’s impressive!” and they respond with “I wasn’t aiming for that one.”
This is called “hanging a lantern” on stretches of the imagination (but it still doesn’t explain the max effective range on a 9mm Glock).
This list is ranked from “Okay, I guess the show creators are taking some creative freedom with that” to “Wait… what? But why… what?”
Minor non-specific spoilers ahead if you care about spoiler tags.
#6. Cocking your weapon multiple times
This one isn’t specific to just The Walking Dead. If you’ve never picked up a weapon before, you might think guns are ready to jump into bang-bang mode at any moment. This doesn’t happen in reality. A weapon won’t fire a round if there’s no round in the chamber. And it is possible that they did chamber their weapon off-screen — not everything in life is cinematic enough to make good cinema/television.
But this isn’t like weapon maintenance and cleaning. Even more egregious is when they show the same weapon being cocked when they’re about to start fighting. And then again when they’re seconds away from a fire fight. Possible? Totally. But we’d see that round that was chambered a few minutes ago fly out. Just going to gloss right over the manual cocking sound of a revolver being applied to semi-auto pistols, but you catch the drift.
I won’t bore you with my rant on how there’s never any brass on the ground, unless it’s for a cool low-angle “after battle” shot (Television Series “The Walking Dead” by AMC)
#5. Who needs a rear sight post anyways?
Quick run down on how aiming works: Think of when you were looking at the stars. If you line up a tree with, say, a fence post and sit in the same spot days later. You can observe the movement in the sky. You lined up the object at four points. The star, the tree, fence post, and your eye. You need two points between your eye and the star to keep positioning just right in a straight line.
In the case of a firearm, that straight line is also the barrel. Take away a sight post, that straight line is skewed. All of this means that it won’t hit jacksh*t, and the characters wasted their time zeroing their weapons.
Or maybe no one needs to zero their weapon in the zombie apocalypse…
#4. Who needs an eye to look through the scope anyways?
Okay. Maybe they’re so intertwined with their weapon that it becomes second nature. Like previously mentioned, everyone is an expert as shooting walkers from god knows how far. The rifle being brought up to the shoulder may just be out of second nature.
What about our characters that don’t have their dominant firing eye? What the hell are they even aiming at?
#3. Infinite Ammo Cheat Codes
L1, R1, SQUARE, R1, LEFT, R2, R1, LEFT, SQUARE, DOWN, L1, L1.
Apparently everyone types this in before every episode of the show, because unless it’s for dramatic tension, no one runs out of ammunition. The world is ending. It’s a constant worry in the show to find food. But ammo? Nah. We got it covered.
#2. Misunderstanding what certain bullets do
Last science rundown: Newton’s Third Law of Motion. All forces between two objects exist in equal magnitude and opposite direction. Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.
In firearm science, this means that the kickback from firing a weapon will hit the target with a similar kick, accounting for minor air resistance and many other factors. So if you were to shoot a handgun at someone, they are hit with the same force. It’d hurt like a b*tch, but no one is flying through a window.
Same works the other way around to. If you shoot a M2 .50 Caliber machine gun into the engine block of a civilian jeep, it won’t just ding off like some dirt.
#1. Head shots for days against zombies, but no one can seem to hit a human for some reason
Why why WHY can no one hit a single living person? Plot armor must be a hell of a thing. At least the Stormtroopers have a reason for why their aim ‘sucks’.
Related: 6 reasons why it would suck to be a Stormtrooper in Star Wars
*Bonus* Just. No. That’s not how that works…
