July 9, 2014 Article

The Old Coot wonders when guns got so heavy.

By Merlin Lessler

I’ve got to get this out of my system. No, it’s not another rant about the Weather Service squawk blasting from my TV, usually at a critical juncture in a high drama, warning of a thunderstorm approaching Cortland County. No, this rant is much more lighthearted. It’s a poke at the gun toting federal agents on TV shows, CSI, NCIS, NCIS-LA and the like. What’s with their gun skills? You see the same thing on all those kind of shows; a team of agents kick open a door, leap into a room, jump left, jump right, sweep a nine millimeter Glock back and forth, held up in front of their face, with TWO hands, and yell, “Clear!” Then, they move to the next room, looking very much like an army of giant, leaping frogs. A bad guy emerges from the back, holds his gun in one hand, fires, misses and then goes down in a hail of bullets, fired from guns, firmly held in TWO hands. 

I grew up in the cowboy movie era. A rifle was the only gun anyone held with two hands. A bad guy would make a move, inch his hand closer and closer to the six-shooter sticking out of his holster that rode low on his hip and was tied to his leg with a strip of rawhide. The good guy’s gun would fly out his holster and blast the gun out of the bad guy’s hand. Then the movie hero, in my case, Hop-a-long Cassidy, would audition the bad guy for a part in “So you think you can dance” by firing random shots at his feet and yelling, “Dance cowboy, dance!” Then, he’d spin his gun backwards on his index finger, blow the smoke off the end of the barrel and slip it back into its holster. All this, using just ONE hand!

Gunslingers in the old west, at least in the movies, stood erect and shot from the hip. Their accuracy was on par with a modern day sniper using a rifle with a high-powered scope. Sometimes, a gunslinger would simply shoot the gun belt off a bad guy’s waist. But, not today’s two-handed gun graspers. They go into a crouch, hold their guns at eye level with two hands, squint and then pull the trigger. Today’s guns aren’t just heavier (requiring two hands to hold them up) they’re apparently harder to aim, too.

It’s comical to watch a modern day crime show with a memory bank loaded with old cowboy movies.  Every time I see a squad of federal agents doing the frog-hop-shuffle, an image of John Wayne flashes through my head. He’s standing behind the leapfrogging agents, chuckling, as he shoots the bad guys with a gun in each hand, shooting from the hip. It makes you wonder about modern day gunslingers. At least the ones on TV.