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Cheers - AE

Tuesday 28 July 2009

Read a bloody physics textbook.

This passes for journalism? (My bold).
A police firearms instructor accidentally shot and badly injured a civilian worker at a firearms awareness session at its HQ.
Keith Tilbury was blasted through the liver at close range by firearms officer PC David Micklethwaite, in front of horrified colleagues.
The bullet from the Magnum .44 revolver - described as 'the most powerful handgun in the world' by Clint Eastwood's uncompromising policeman Dirty Harry - passed through Mr Tilbury and the chair he was sitting on, lodging in the seat behind.
Mr Tilbury was blown off his chair and thrown half way across the room.
Utter bullshit. Not to diminish the seriousness of the incident in any way, but unless Isaac Newton was in fact talking out of his arse no-one gets thrown halfway across any room larger than a broom cupboard. A bullet that knocked Mr Tilbury across the room would have knocked PC Micklethwaite the same distance in the other direction, possibly further since the bullet both passed through the unfortunate Mr Tilbury and still managed to throw him through the air. I really can't be bothered to make even back of envelope calculations for this since it's obvious that if a bullet that powerful would make for a gun that's fucking impossible to hold onto when you fire the damn thing, and while I know that big calibre handguns do kick like buggery - and also that I'm quite shit at shooting them - I'm sure I'd have noticed if any went flying out of my hands or threw me backwards from the firing station. This sort of shithouse reporting fosters both the unwarranted mystique and the irrational fear surrounding guns, and what really pisses me off about this story is that it's quite serious enough without the Daily Fail writing physics defying movie style bullshit into it.

H/T The Penguin at Old Holborn.

5 comments:

JuliaM said...

Here's video of a .700 Nitro Express rifle being fired, a gun that makes the Magnum look like a Vauxhall Astra compared to a Ferrari.

Notice how the man significantly did NOT fly across the room?

'Daily Fail' writers obviously pay as much attention to the laws of physics as Marevel comics writers...

JuliaM said...

Ooops. Here.

Angry Exile said...

Yeah, real life is never as spectacular. But why should the media worry when they can just make it up? Guns give you cancer as well you know. And cause global warming. And the financial crisis.

Wankers.

JuliaM said...

"Guns give you cancer as well you know."

Thanks to Marvel Comics once again, art imitates trashy tabloid scare stories:

"..Aaron finds a way to outmatch him with a gang of villains that are similarly enhanced, but with guns that shoot cancer and claws made of lasers.

One more time, that’s: guns that shoot cancer and claws made of lasers.

Boom. Review done. I don’t have to say anything else..."


;)

Angry Exile said...

Julia, as a man in his mid 30s there is a substantial part of me that is still about 8 years old, so I still get comics. But guns that shoot cancer and claws made of lasers?

What?

The?

Fuck?

Even when I really was 8 years old I can't imagine I'd have taken that seriously. There's such a thing as the credibility envelope - oh yes, even for men and even when they're (literally or figuratively) 8 years old.

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