I picked up a Jake the Dog costume and wore it when I went to pick up my daughter at the movies. I was planning on possibly embarrassing her, instead I was getting honks and hoots, and waves - it was like I was a celebrity! After a few minutes, I was waving at people, and giving thumbs up, and the like. When I found my daughter, she wasn't all that embarrassed, and just kinda went, "Oh, that's my daaaddd", with a smile.

Had I not experienced that myself, I might not believe anyone would don a costume for the sake of vicarious adulation - but, it was pretty fun, so I think I can see that.

Mind you I wouldn't hang around a school (in any costume) waiting for kids to come out and adore me - I would be worried that I would look like a creep; and I certainly wouldn't walk around with anything that looks like a genuine firearm.

...What happened to people having conversations with other people?

Internet. The internet happened.

ineed it is and to "empty a clip (into something)" is a figure of speach meaning shooting your gun empty.

A clip is a device that holds ammo.

So i fail to see what Vigil finds so amusing/wrong about that.

Maybe the unfamiliarity is colloquial. I'm from the mid-west in the U.S. and I think most people refer to it as a clip. It is going to say magazine on the package but everyone nobody gets uppity about it. I got your back man, we say that everyday.

Yeah!

Also, i said "empty the clip." I never refred to the magazine as a clip (wich some posters seemed to asume.) and since the clip is used to hold rounds of ammo inside a magazine, that means that when you shoot all the ammo in said magazine the clip will be empty. Hence :empty the clip is correct.

People also call the American Bison a buffalo. It is not. Some people refer to the Netherlands as Holland. It is not. That they do so doesn't make it right.

Literally, "To empty your clip," means to insert cartridges into your magazine. Emptying your clip any other way results in having a bunch of loose cartridges hanging around. And why would you want that?

Emptying your magazine might result in a similar situation... or you can press the trigger of a loaded firearm repeatedly to achieve the same result, the result that is intended by the phrase, "Empty your clip."

Of course, some firearms don't possess magazines, so you could use the alternative, "Go cyclic," but that doesn't apply if your firearm is manually-operated or semi-automatic only.

At best, "Empty your clip," is archaic (the last firearm in common usage to possess an en bloc clip was the M1 Garand - which fell out of use almost 60 years ago and was obsolescent a decade before), at worst it is ignorant or stupid. Being ignorant is not so much a shame, as being unwilling to learn.

This is a clip. They usually don't go inside a magazine or weapon, and certainly not ones made made in this century.

This is a clip being used to load rounds into a magazine.

These are clips. They only go inside of some revolvers.

This is not a clip. This is a magazine, it's what most weapons use, and it's what most (or all) people usually mean when they refer to a 'clip.'

For the most part, firearms use magazines, not clips. You can use whatever term you want, and people will know what you're talking about simply out of common use. That doesn't make it accurate, and it doesn't mean that you should do it, especially if you don't want to sound ignorant. I'm not using that term pejoratively, but if you don't know the difference between a clip and a magazine, or you do and you use the term anyways, you are being ignorant.

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/figure+of+speech

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/figure+of+speech

Bro, it's OK to be wrong. Everybody's wrong sooner or later. Even WonderWAAAGH ( ).

Fine i'll admit that a clip is not the same as a magzine (wich i nevber said it was) and that in a llteral sense it should have been "Lucky the cops didn't empty the magazine by shooting all the bullets in mr wannabe storm trooper". But then i've never heard the phrase "empty the magazine". (I have heard of "empty the clip")

Bro, it's OK to be wrong. Everybody's wrong sooner or later. Even WonderWAAAGH ( ).

It happens, but you'll never see me admit it.

I remember a story my grandfather told of how in his military training (He was in the first world war... and I suddenly feel old now), if you referred to your rifle as a gun , you were disciplined by being made to stand before the other troops and rehearse the following statement a few dozen times while brandishing your rifle,

"this is my rifle,"

"this is my gun," (referring to one's manhood, as there were no women soldiers back then)

"this is for fight, and"

"this is for fun"

Those sorts of distinctions are typical of military training.

I didn't know the difference between a clip and a magazine until I read the comments in this thread. Seems reasonable to me.

Yeah, even though I'm pro-gun and think that most of these teachers/principals/admin's who suspend a kid for making a gun out of a poptart or their fingers, need to spend time with a counselor to discuss the difference between a weapon and a poptart...

Standing outside a school with a toy gun, especially one that looks as nice as that one is a huge mistake and just asking for trouble. I don't care if you're in costume or not, it's just a bad idea.

Way to easy to glue some plastic bits to a real SMG and then go on a shooting spree.

As an aside in the British army a 'gun' has to be over 20mm. Below that its small arms

called your rifle, weapon, gat, bullet chucker, bang stick etc etc but never a gun.

We also don't use the holywood favourite word 'jam' when a weapon fails to fire. We use the word 'stoppage' and then get on with the immediate actions to return it to working order depending on the nature of the 'stoppage'.

If Full Metal Jacket has tought me anything (and it hasn't...well beside the Mickey Mouse club song)

then it is that "gun" means "p*nis."

This is my rifle, this is my gun

This is for fighting, this is for fun

Question, so if in hollywood they say "my gun is jammed" what does the british army say? "My gun is/has stopped"? It can't be "stoppaged" surely?

The radar is being jammed!

what flavor?

Raspberry.

Only one man would dare give me the raspberry...

Lone Star!

You are either in battle , exercise or on a range so you tend to shout as you've either got ear defenders on and loads of rifles firing around you or its a bloody loud battle.

You shout 'stoppage!' so your section commander knows you're not putting fire down (no movement without fire and fire without movement is pointless on the attack).

Once you know your weapon isnt firing you do what are called 'IA' drill (immeditate action) to work out why you have a stoppage.

Its usually either a poorly extracted round (happens more often with blank) that has lodged sideways in the ejection port.. in which case you pull the working parts to the back and free the casing then carry on. or its a stoppage in the feed from the mag, you then replace the mag and carry on, if its not that it could be excessive fouling of the gas parts.. that takes longer to fix as you've got to get your combi tool out of a pouch or the pistol grip and set the gas parts to 'excessive', if its still not firing then you've probably got a broken firing pin so you're screwed. There are other stoppages but those are the main ones.

Basically your section commander doesnt need to know *why* you're not contributing to 'winning the firefight' (the art of putting more lead downrange than the enemy is and forcing them to keep down while your manouvre elements flank them or in dire circumstances advance head on), he just needs to know that you're not firing.

Unless its tactically unsound... if you're stopping firing because you're changing magazine its common to shout 'MAGAZINE' so that again you're section commander knows he's got 1/8th less firepower or that his LSW /M249 isnt firing.

Obviously you don't shout that if its likely to let someone know you're going to be unable to fire for five to ten seconds (depending on how fast your mag changing skills are).

To further complicate things... while you're putting fire down on an exercise or in a firefight (or even just on the range) you have to COUNT the amount of rounds fired as at the end when you've taken the objective the section commander needs to know how much ammo you've expended so he can order in a ressuply from the platoon sgt.

at most you're carrying about 120 rounds for yourself and either a belt for the GPMG or 249 or two mags for the LSW, you're only supposed to fire the ammo meant for you but you do have to keep track of it.

Its not so bad when you fire every magazine until its totally expended but thats tactically a bad move, you try and put in a fresh mag whenever there is a lull and remember the old one only had 15 left in it etc. Stops you getting caught short at a bad time.

Most of this is moderated by daily cleaning of your personal weapon and correctly charging magazines. For example you clean your rilfles gas parts every day so you shouldnt get a gas part fouling until you've put *hundreds* of rounds through it. Likewise you check the bolt and firing pin for wear and if its looking ropey you put a spare in. Magazine are checked to make sure the rounds are seated with the primers as far back as possible etc.

Most of what you see in films is utter balls

Most films have people blazing away and hitting anything they point at, we only use automatic fire to either clear a trench or in defence of a trench about to be overerun as its just a waste of ammo otherwise, in urban ops you use it a lot more though.

Think of the amount of fims where you see some one blazing away with a handgun.. you simply would not hit anyone.

Likewise in 'saving private ryan' when they decide to take on the german MG... despite having a BAR with comparable range, the element of surprise and a scoped springfield carried by a trained sniper they don't actually do the correct thing of supressing the MG team with the sniper and BAR while the rest *flank* the position to a point it cant traverse to (as it clearly has no supporting positions providing 'defence in depth).... no they just run headlong at it.

In reality their marksman would have been able to take out the crew before they even knew what hit them as he'd be firing the second shot about the time the first one was heard after it hit.

This is my wife, an untrained shooter but under an experts instruction, firing a *single* round from a .45acp 1911. Notice how far the muzzle climbs even when braced well and held firmly... then imagine emptying the magazine jon woo style in a few seconds and how far off target it would be!

http://vid91.photobucket.com/albums/k311/gadgeeuropa/20111%20UPLOADS/IMG_5081_zpsacimrjll.mp4

SAW gunners firring their gun just long enough to say "die motherf*cker die", true or false? Do they actually say that? Do they have to say something else?

That's just something to teach new recruits to keep burst around 6 to 9 rounds. A good SAW gunner doesn't need to say a phrase every time he pulls the trigger.

I'd just fire the thing until the barrel melts off; there's a reason why they give you two.

True story: if a barrel gets hot enough it'll start to glow a dull red. If you then look at it with your NODs, it kind of looks like a light saber mounted on the end.

Another true story: you don't know how scary ricochets are until you start firing tracer rounds. I've seen bullets actually zig-zag across a range before.

If you watch helos land through NVG they have a wierd halo around them caused by the static charge IIRC.

NV is bloody wierd anyway, the ones we had in the 90s made everything look about two feet further away than it was so you were always tripping up

With regards to barrels on LMGs, back when we used the L4/Bren LMG from WWII to the 80s it was accutally TOO accurate as an LMG.

A good lmg gunner wants to create a 'beaten zone' with a spread of fire that covers a large area and makes it hazardous for the enemy to lift his head. German MG42s and some MG3 during the cold war even had a device you could fit to the tripod to 'jiggle' the weapon in firing to further disperse the fall of shot.

A good British bren/l4 team would keep an old worn out barrel in the spare barrel bag for when this sort of fire was needed.

Wonderwaaagh, i've been scared enough in the buts on the range when the mechanisms for lifting the targets up and down broke so some genius gave us figure 11s nailed to poles to hold up. You could feel every round go through them and occasionally they would hit a nail and bounce off in a random direction!

I think i learnt more about 'effective enemy fire' on that afternoon than i'd learned in months previous

In Saving Private Ryan 's defense, the M1903A4 was kind of a POS: They did not give the rifles any special care with regards to accuracy, did not fit them with back-up irons, and fitted a piddly little 2.5x scope (although we do see the sniper fitting an 8x Unertl during the churchtower scene where Vin Diesel gets hit).

The Marines with their M1903A1 sniper rifles did much better: They took rifles from regular production M1903A1s that shot the best, kept the iron sights, and fitted them with a removable 8x Unertl scope.

And the BAR was a good gun but a horrible LMG.

I also don't remember anyone ever complaining about machine guns being too accurate - and that experiments in making them less accurate didn't generally end well.

In any case, it seems interesting to me that the basic load for a British squaddie is only 120 rounds. For the US Army, it's 210 - and you carry a lot more if you know you're going to do some shooting.

Also: Here's a video of a couple of very experienced guys shooting a very nice 1911 in a hurry (with some cool slow-mo):

So, have we made this the official firearms thread now?

Meh, might as well...

so about those AA-12's, nice guns, yes?

In any case, it seems interesting to me that the basic load for a British squaddie is only 120 rounds. For the US Army, it's 210 - and you carry a lot more if you know you're going to do some shooting.

I think it is a hangover from the British Army's traditional obsession with precision marksmanship. During WWII we persisted with bolt actions believing them to be more accurate on the whole and continued to use modified lee enfields for snipers up until the mid 80s.

During the cold war we insisted on having a semi only variant of the FN FAL, again under the belief that automatic fire is 'unaimed' and we only take aimed shots (i was once kicked in the helmet for not 'aiming' blank fire on an exercise!)

Our 'deliberate' rate of fire is one round every six seconds, our 'rapid' which we seldom use is one every two seconds. Automatic fire is for the assault, when you're about to be overrun or FIBUA. Automatic 'beaten zone' and supressing fire is the job of the LSW/249/GPMG/L4 depending on the era.

Im not saying other nations don't 'only take aimed shots' but it's litterally hammered into us to be extremely accurate and aware of where every round is aimed and ending up. I think 40 years of counter insurgency in Northern Ireland made that essential as a wounded civilian was a golden recruiting tool for paramilitaries on either side of the troubles.

Also we are tight fisted in comparison to the colonials, I couldn't get in because of asthma but I have friends who served one Sam was a quartermaster and he has loads to say regarding yanks, one weekend they did a cross training exercise on the firing range the brits were using their magazines up and putting them back in their pouches to hand in later for replenishment but the Americans even though they'd been asked to were not they'd expand one and just throw it away.

So Sam had to stay on the range till they recovered every last bit of equipment he wasn't overly impressed.