My generation grew up in the golden age of TV Westerns. One we regularly watched in our home was “The Rifleman” starring Chuck Connors. A fellow nostalgia buff took the time to splice together all of lead character Lucas McCain’s shootouts. The body count he came up with was … 120.
Budget ten minutes to see it here:
Takeaway lessons:
My generation grew up with TV role models who racked up three-figure body counts, sometimes four at a time, and managed not to go out and perform mass homicides for real.
The Western gunfighters of mid-20th Century television apparently had bad-guy-seeking bullets. Notice how often the lead character shoots from the hip, with his muzzle angled starkly upward, and the camera then cuts to bad guys some distance away clutching their chests and falling. Simple geometry tells us that if Chuck Connors had been firing live ammo, a huge number of his bullets would have gone harmlessly over the heads of his targets.
Those gunfighters also had time machines. Presumably, “The Rifleman” was set in the 1870s-1880s. The stylized large-loop-lever signature gun of the star is a Model 1892 Winchester. The gun nerds tell us that the props Connors used consisted of a rotating battery of three of them, two ’92 Winchesters and one South American copy, the El Tigre. A stud inside the trigger guard of the lever hit the trigger as the action closed, allowing his rapid spray of shooting. Of course, with this device in place, every time you jacked a round into the chamber, your gun would fire.
Those gunfighters could also defy the law of gravity. The Winchesters had open-top actions. When Connors did his trademark one-handed flip to chamber a round, in real life the cartridge would have fallen out of the top of the rifle before it came back level, and the chamber would be empty when he pulled the trigger. Hollywood lore has it that Connors’ prop rifles were fitted with studs to keep the “five-in-one” blanks (so called because they were shaped to fit five different calibers) from falling out when he did that stunt. Why didn’t the rifle go off when he merely chambered a round? It wasn’t telekinesis: the stud inside the lever was adjustable. Only thing was, you had to be in league with the scriptwriters and the propmaster, who would make sure that device was adjusted properly before that particular scene was shot.
Those gunfighters faced zombies before George Romero thought of them. Watch carefully – in different episodes, the same character actors playing bad guys get blown away again and again.
Yes, it’s true…we gun people love to make fun of gun stuff that appears on the entertainment screens. The hell of it is, though, those “Hey, wait a minute, I smell contradictory BS” moments come in the study of ACTUAL past gunfights, too…and unless something newsworthy comes up in the meantime, we’ll discuss THAT next in this space.
I watched all of those shows, and had toy guns that looked real. My friends and I played Cowboys and Indians, Cops and Robbers, and WWII. I have yet to actually point a real gun, loaded or unloaded, at another person. Yet the so called Liberal Psychologists/Psychiatrist, and Human Behavior Specialist, will tell you that this is supposed to make us killers. I watched cartoons with, what they refer to as, violence, and the Three Stooges, and Abbot & Costello, Laurel & Hardy too. I have never hit anybody with a Wrench. I have never run a saw over some one’s head. I have never hit anybody, except in self defense. Fortunately, I was always better than the other guy. Oh by the way, this shit never really happened in the west. AND YES…My brother and I love to tear apart a TV show when they make a firearm mistakes. I would love to have one of those 44/40 Colts that never get empty, though.