There’s always a but
I like guns. I come from a gun family. I am a 2nd Amendment, pro-gun liberal—which makes me a very lonely creature when the subject comes up in casual conversation around the office. And part of the pleasure of any Michael Mann movie is identifying what the fashionable young man is killing people with this season. Sometimes it’s easy. In “Collateral,” Tom Cruise’s primary weapon is a .45-caliber Heckler & Koch USP fed with 12-round clips. This is a terrific lightweight automatic, and Cruise—as a testament to what must have been weeks of trigger time—handles it like a pro. The HK USP is versatile. Winter, summer, whenever. You can dress it down with a pair of loafers, or dress it up with a jacket and tie for a rampage out on the town.
…
The drug cartel guys deploy a variety of very fun assault rifles. Their big gun—and the most overtly political weapon in the film—appears to be a Barrett .50-caliber M107 semiautomatic rifle, a 32-pound, 5-foot-long military sniper rifle that was banned in California starting last year, for the altogether sensible reason that it can bring down airliners
All this in a movie review? First, it’s not a clip. And it is as likely for a .50Cal to take a plane out of the sky as it is a 300 WinMag, 338 Lapua or, even, a 30-06. Which is to say that it hasn’t happened yet and likely won’t.
August 30th, 2006 at 10:14 am
The USP .45 is light? Hmmm…apparently I have the heavy model.
August 30th, 2006 at 10:23 am
Every time I hear the airliner thing, I flash back to a range just north of Ft Bliss, TX.
We were doing an exercise called Small Arms for Air Defense. We lined up about 15 across, and they flew drones by us and we tried to shoot them down. We were leading, adjusting for bullet drop, etc, but we didn’t shoot down a single one.
August 30th, 2006 at 4:45 pm
The only way small arms have any actual use for air defense is to throw lots of tracers into the sky and hopefully make the pilot go away.