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.

1 COMMENT

  3. Funny he hit more than 10% of the bad guys with the barrel of the rifle jumping around as he levered it. Never noticed that when the series ran.

  4. Not to forget “Combat”, “Gallant Men”, a whole passel of John Wayne westerns, and war movies.

    Now, it’s obvious, the violence is gratuitous and postmodern “relativistic”.

  5. Also consider “The A-Team.” My pastor sometimes quotes from that show, and I mentioned to him once that it was indeed a very entertaining program.

    His response (and the gun-nut in me really got a kick out of this in agreement): “Yup, and all those gun fights where no one ends up shot.”

    Entertaining as hell, but who cares. Just like car enthusiasts joke about the number of gears the drivers shift through in the Fast & Furious movies (and how they always seem to increase power and revs on the UPshifts… heh heh heh). We know it’s utter BS, but the entertainment value is still there.

  6. LOL!! I’d forgotten how dorky that show really was, but I sure loved it way back then. I think I watched every episode. (hard to admit that now) :c)

  8. Guns that never seemed to run out bullets( Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, etc.).
    Annie Oakley who opened every episode shooting the ace of spades card while riding a horse standing up, but always missing the escaping bad guys in the opening scene of the episode. Good guys always wore white hats and nickel plated peacemakers, bad guys black hats and blue steel. Good overcame evil. What’s not to love.
    One thing the “Rifleman” did teach us was the “tactical reload”. In the intro to every episode, keeping his eyes on the newly deceased opponent, then reaching into his shirt pocket for ammo and feeding it into the loading port.
    Another anomaly was his hip shooting was always right handed, but he always shot left handed from the shoulder as I recall.

  9. My favorite is still Marshall Dillon. I’ve often wondered if anyone ever took the
    time to add up how many times Matt got shot during the 20 year run of the
    series. Doc Adams must have been one hell of an M.D.

  10. I saw what you did, Mas. You hid an object lesson and semi-judgmental observation inside a long post about Hollywood guns! Thought you could put one over on us, huh?

    Kidding aside, I think it’s because we knew what was on TV was just TV. No amount of playing “army” or “cops & robbers” could induce me to pick up a real gun in anger. And let’s not forget the parental retribution we feared worse than the law, which seems to be the key component missing today.

    Since we’re going to the Golden Age of TV…did it ever seem like Artemis Gordon (Wild Wild West) was the WORST “master of Disguise” ever? 🙂

  11. As a kid I had a copy of that gun (I wish I still had it $$$) and it also had a little leaver on the trigger guard that would allow the gun to fire every time it was pulled/cocked.
    Lots of fun and a good fake gun to play with!!

  12. Well, I did see about 10 times when he actually brought his rifle to the shouder level, and could have been using the sights, maybe?

  13. After viewing the video compilation, I correct myself, Lucas was evidently just as good with either hand. I guess my memory was faulty, as it seems to be more frequently, as I advance through geezer-hood.
    Still a good lesson for all of us to devote practice with both hands to the point where the exchange is as seamless as it appears for for our old time hero.

  14. While I an younger than Mas, I this was one if my favorite western tv shows when I was growing up and coincidentally just go through watching most of the entire series on Netflix. For some reason a kit of episodes were not available.

    I was amazed that the I the episode that aired October 11, 1960 at the end Chuck Connors character made a statement that has become so true in recent years. After some escaped convicts basically took over the town Johnny Crawford asked Chuck if they could have “lost” the town. Chuck relied that they could never lose the town and the same was true for losing the country. He said the only way a people could lose a town or a country is when the people get careless and stop paying attention to how it’s being run.

    Obviously in late 1960 we had not lost our country as I believe we have over the last fee decades. This was so prophetic I recorded it onto my phone so I could show those friends of mine who are like-minded the clip

  15. Once again, you folks seem “reel” old! I never saw any of those shows but I remember watching Charles Bronson and Steve McQueen shoot it out with Eli Walach in “Magnificent Seven”. My dad had all his favorite Western movies on VHS.

  16. [As a kid I had a copy of that gun ]

    I did to. Imagine, a toy gun without an orange tip that loaded plastic cartridges. I had a couple of other toy guns that fired plastic bullets from spring-loaded cases. They would probably get me SWATted today.

    [Good guys always wore white hats and nickel plated peacemakers, bad guys black hats and blue steel.]

    Nope. Hopalong Cassidy. http://www.hopalong.com/home.asp
    Have Gun-Will Travel, http://www.hgwt.com/

  17. Yep, but as kids we didn’t CARE… With 3 channels (in good locations) we were happy to be able to watch anything! And these were all low budget shows (relatively speaking) so the bad guys were ‘simulated’ by a clothing change…

  18. Well, I’m old enough to have grown up watching The Rifleman and Wanted: Dead or Alive and it’s true that I must’ve seen a lot of TV shootouts as a kid. I think that back then, in part because of censorship codes and the fact that the country was more innocent, it was always clear who the good was and he (almost) always won. After the end of the ’60s this movie & TV morality was challenged and the studio system fell apart with its rigid rules – think Clint Eastwood succeeding to John Wayne.

    Lt.Col. Grossman squarely blames the increase in violence on Hollywood and video games, claiming that they desensitize and condition our youth the way military training does. He may be right and it’s amusing that the Left, who’s behind most of what Hollywood puts out, sex and violence included, likes to hide behind the 1st amendment and absolve itself of responsibility while denying gun people protection under the 2nd.
    But as you point out, Mas, violence on the small and big screens is nothing new. I think that what may be missing today is built-in safeguards against temptations to act on certain violent impulses that we all have. Loss of family values, MIA dads leaving boys without roles models and discipline, glorification of immoral celebrities, athletes and politicians… there’s too many causes for me to quite understand why kids turn to guns today when fists (and rarely knives) had to do way back when.

    If our society lacks a collective super-ego… I’m tempted to put it on liberals who, after all, took over the entertainment industry, the education system and the media long enough to be blamed for how young minds turn out these days.

  19. I should amend my above post by saying that I’m a fan of Eastwood work and actually enjoy ambivalent characters – they’re much more interesting and realistic. But the risk is probably there when kids are so impressionable. We may be living a Manchurian Candidate experiment on a national scale, I don’t know.

    Another factor for the rise in violent outbursts is probably the urbanization of society: more people means more frictions with total strangers instead of neighbors and that leads to more pent-up rage and unrestained violence. An old sci-fi novel by John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar, predicted this, by the way.
    Combine road rage, tense race relations, overpopulation, and a gun culture… and you could have a recipe for the mass shootings we see with regularity.

  20. Old NFO is right. Back then, kids cared little about continuity even when we noticed it. We just enjoyed the characters and the theme. Like Jaji, I never associated my real gun (.22 JC Higgins single shot) with anything on TV. It makes one wonder why we could so easily distinguish fantasy and reality as children when today so many adults (especially politicians) struggle with that.

    Old HAC (Old NFO will understand)

  22. That brings back memories. I didn’t like westerns as a little kid but grew to like them when I was a teenager. By the time I was that old, I thought the idea of using a rifle was pretty good since it held more ammunition (in real life) and was better at longer ranges. I still have the urge for a carbine in .357 or .44 mag. as a truck gun.

    I await the body count for Marshal Dillon as well as the number of times he was shot.

  23. Its funny but that was one i grew up on aswell. Along with “The Lone Ranger”!
    Ive never really got into the new shows. Guess my favorite was The Andy Griffith show.
    I can remember a rite up in the local paper when i was a kid after the episode the night before. Its the one were Andy took barney’s gun, and shot the tire out on a station wagon
    Of some counterfiters. It read to were they couldnt belive a well respected family show needed gun fire! Lol looking back, ive often thought WOW.. To me thats great t.v.! I still watch on MeTV.
    Here in the last few weeks my eyes have heard “The old West” many time.
    Our state past the resturant/bar carry. And seems everyone in the media must have watchd these types of westerns as well.. Becuse they say, we gona have shoot outs in bars like the old west! Lol..
    God bless..

  24. Well, he DID bring a rifle to a pistol fight, you have to give him credit for that. They could have done a sequel about a guy with shotgun…

  25. Did anyone else notice that Connors shot his rifle both left and right handed with equal accuracy? No matter who threw itto him or from what direction he seemed to be able to lever the gun with his nearest hand and hit his marks.

  26. Don’t forget the even more impressive use of a cut down Winchester Model 1892 “Mare’s Leg” by Steve McQueen in the TV series “Wanted: Dead Or Alive.” He could hit anything with that gun at any distance, even when shooting from the hip. Even more miraculous was that he could somehow get those .45-70 cartridges on his gun belt to fit into a gun that was never chambered for them.

    You can actually buy a working reproduction of that Mare’s Leg in gun stores today. They’re available in .38/.357, .44 Mag., .45 LC, & .22 LR. You can even find a gun belt & holster like the one Steve McQueen used to carry it. I doubt if you’ll ever see anyone win a Cowboy Action Shooting event with one, though, because they’re very hard to shoot accurately even at close range, but they look cool & they’re classified as handguns by the BATF so they don’t require a tax stamp. I’ve never been able to get a .45-70 cartridge to chamber in one, though, but maybe some enterprising manufacturer will cut down a Model 1886 in .45-70 to make a Mare’s Leg someday. That would be a handful, but it would be a perfect complement to the Bond Arms 500 S & W Magnum derringer that we’re all so eagerly awaiting (if they haven’t made any already).

    Speaking of derringers, my favorite TV western has always been “Yancy Derringer.” Even as a child, I was never that impressed by Yancy, although he was very likeable, but I was awestruck by his Pawnee Indian companion Pahoo-Ka-Ta-Wah. Pahoo never said much, but he wore a Bowie knife on his back behind his neck & carried a sawed off double-barreled shotgun underneath a blanket which he wore over his shoulders. No matter what happened, one thing you could count on was that at least once in every episode Pahoo would blow the @#*% out of some bad guy, who would go crashing through the window behind him, then in the next split second he would turn, reach behind his neck, & throw that Bowie knife across the room into the heart of another bad guy! Needless to say, the first time I saw that I forgot about all of the other TV western heroes…I wanted to be like Pahoo. I still do. You can check him out by searching for Yancy Derringer on Wikipedia. Someone should compile a reel of his shootouts like they did for The Rifleman. That would be worth seeing!

  27. Slighty off ball but I had to laugh at the bit in the film Who framed Roger Rabbit, where Bob Hoskins use a toon six shooter. The bullets get lost after being fired because they’re dum dums lol!
    As another poster above mentions the A team used to amaze me. Hundreds of rounds fired both ways, no one gets shot and they all get captured. Then they escape and capture all theheavily armed bad guys using 2 gas cylinders, bean cans and twine!

  28. I can actually say that I had a hand in getting “The Rifleman” onto TV. When I was 12 my Mom took me to NYC for screenings of TV show pilots. I don’t remember the others but “The Rifleman” was sure to be a hit in my 12-year-old mind. We both voted for it and some months later it aired. At the time I didn’t realize (but I do now) that there was always a good message to be learned in each episode when Lucas would sum up that “adventure” to Mark.
    One of the best was when Lucas told Mark that “Guns are just tools. They can’t hurt anyone by themselves. They can be used for bad but can also be used for good.” Where’s that message today?
    For Dave: Yancy Derringer was played by Jock Mahoney, a Hollywood stuntman turned actor. He did all his own stunts. I don’t remember any shotgun under a cape but he did have a 4-barrelled derringer, a bowie knife and a sword cane.

  29. As to Chuck Connors’ preferred hand: He was one of the few truly ambidextrous folks around, whether shooting baskets or rifles, if the Wikipedia report is to be believed. I, too, had a lever-action toy gun that fired on closing; it was a cap-gun that had a small hinged lever inside the trigger guard that could be slid up or down. I hated pinching my finget in that bugger! What I like most of the Westerns, especially The Rifleman, is that there was almost always a morality lesson within, and the adult masculine role model was not a subject of scorn and contempt as in what passes for entertainment today. I often tell folks that my favorite sit-com ended when The Andy Griffith show came to a close. Thanks, Mas, for the trip down memory lane!

  30. When you were a kid there was something called standards – standards of conduct, standards to be promoted to the next grade, etc. In the left leaning good intentioned thought of all inclusiveness or all being equal we have lowered or completely removed standards. Instead of reaching to achieve something the bar is now set low enough that even a paralyzed slug can make it over. We are reaping what we sow in the ills we face today.

    I love how guns are depicted in movies. Some of my favorites are:

    1: No one seems to carry a round in the chamber. Even when holding someone captive they find it necessary to rack the slide or pump the shotgun to prove they are serious about shooting them. Don’t bad guys know that guns can’t go bang if there is no round in the chamber?

    2: Six shooters that fire nine rounds.

    3: .38’s on up to big owe .50’s that have no recoil. Thank God Dirty Harry was enough of an actor to know his most powerful handgun in the world should jump a little when it went off.

    4. The guns don’t kick but the magic bullets that come from them throw those unlucky enough to be hit for yards. The physical law of equal and opposite force ceases to be in effect on a movie studio.

    5: Silencers. Silencers on revolvers are even more fun.

    I look forward to reading other’s observations of gun tomfoolery.

  31. It was a GREAT show! Lucas was a nice man but you’d best not mess with him or his’n.
    Hit or miss, if somebody fired that many rounds that fast in my direction, I would definitely leave and need a change of underwear…

  32. Ah yes, the tv westerns of our youth.
    I preferred HAVE GUN WILL TRAVEL. Paladin had a custom Colt made to his specifications with a rifled barrel(rare in a revolver) and a 3 oz trigger. (His words)
    I fell asleep many a night hoping to dream of riding the range with Paladin. How about Lawman, Black Saddle, Sugerfoot, Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, and many others.
    While transferring Have Gun video, I couldn’t help but notice that Richard Boone would always blink when he shot a blank.

  33. The 1950’s were (just barely) before my time, so the only classic TV Westerns I remember seeing first-run were Gunsmoke and Bonanza, both of which lasted into the 1970’s. But I have seen The Rifleman, Wanted-Dead or Alive, Maverick, Rawhide, and Wagon Train in syndicated reruns. Despite the high body count, those shows never seemed to glorify or glamorize violence. For one thing, heroes like Lucas McCain (Marshal Dillon, the Cartwrights, et. al.) never shot anyone without justification (self-defense, or to protect others). Even then, they would first try to talk the bad guys into surrendering or riding away; shooting was a last resort. And, afterward, the heroes would often express a wish that the problem could have been solved peaceably (especially in the Rifleman, where each episode usually had an epilog with Lucas explaining a moral lesson to his son). A far cry from Dirty Harry daring the bad guys to resist arrest so that he would have an excuse to shoot them, or James Bond making some pun or quip after killing a villain.

  34. Speaking of Jock Mahoney, he also starred in another TV Western, Range Rider. It was a children’s show, like the Lone Ranger or Hopalong Cassidy. I think it was produced by Gene Autry, as was the Annie Oakley series, which starred Gail Davis. And speaking of Gail Davis, she guest starred in an episode of The Andy Griffith Show, playing a champion skeet shooter.

  35. The craziest TV shootings I must’ve seen as a kid was in spaghetti westerns. People, often Eastwood, would fan that hammer and reholster before anybody could blink AND shoot accurately from the hip. I remember kinda wondering whether it was real, if people could actually do that.
    Ah, the impact of screen heroics… That’s how kids jump off a roof holding an umbrella for parachute one day (done it).

  37. Illinois Bob, it always bothered me ( causing me to cringe ) when the hero would, without hesitation, toss their weapon on the rocky ground when the outlaw got the drop on them. A few would bend over and gently lay it on the ground, but most didn’t.

  38. I really love Have gun will travel and wanted dead or alive.
    there was a later series, the guns of Will Sonnet which was also quite good.
    I grew up watching an old TV show called paradise…about an old gun slinger in a mining town.

    For me, the beauty of those old shows was that they often addressed complex issues of manhood in a respectful way while still managing to entertain.
    So much now seems dumbed down that it doesn’t ring with the truth of the old west.

  39. My favorite was “A Fist-Full of Dollars”, particularly when Eastwood shoots four badguys after mistakingly telling the coffin maker to prepare only three coffins…and I was born in 1990…the old western movies are still the best.

  41. As for the effect on culture

    I generally agree with LTC Grossman, but I think people forget that “first person shooter” games generally use AMORAL characters; in most there is no right or wrong, or everything is shown in a military context where any identified target is fair game. No self control or desire to “do right” is required or promoted.

    The old westerns, on the other hand, promoted “Good Guy”- ness; there were almost always clear expositions of right and wrong, and the good guys were promoting law and civic order, justice and freedom from fear.

    Violence was used in a specifically MORAL context – sometimes you must fight back to defend yourself and home and hearth; Truth, Justice and the American Way are worthy of being defended, and it is OK to use violence as a last resort. As the Lone Ranger intro says “…to defend law and order in the early West.”, or words to that effect.

    Moral context is what we had then, and that is sadly lacking in much of todays popular culture that features violence.

    Secondly, modern pop culture views human life as being significantly less valuable than it was under previous cultural norms. In some societal subcultures “he showed disrespect to me, so I killed him…” is taken as a perfectly respectable and reasonable explanation, seen in the same light as ” …he was slow in giving me his wallet, so I killed him…”, delivered with no shame and no regret.

    That is how times have changed – the moral component is ignored, and human life is devalued – a very big difference from the morality and even nobility of character celebrated by the old westerns

    Regards
    GKT

  42. Don’t forget “Pistols ‘N Petticoats,” Ann Sheridan’s last role. Their specialty was shooting the belt buckle off bad guys, so that their pants would fall down. 🙂

  43. Love how Lucas could hit the gnat on a fleas back when trying to impres someone to not get in a gunfight with him… firing from the hip.
    But when he shot at the bad guys, he couldn’t hit the barn when aiming…
    darn, those were the good ol’days- and I still watch them (Rifleman just ended, in fact- now it’s Hogan’s Heroes).
    How did Josh Randall ever survive being hit on the head so many times? He must’a been deaf as a doorknob…

  45. We shot a SASS stage a few years ago that had Rifleman theme. It included six rifle shots from the hip at a life-size target. Most of us had never even tried hip shooting before but there were very few misses.

  47. After watching this, all I could think of is Spray and Pray was alive and well in the old west, and also, as someone else pointed out, never stand close to Chuck, anyone who did seemed to get shot!

  48. Anybody count the number of shots fired per body? Seems like there was at least three, most times, and now and then he just seems to crank through a whole magazine – though there are some single shot hits.

  49. I probably killed way more bad guys than 120 back in the late 40’s and early 50’s with my Roy Rogers cap guns. Back then Matt Dillon was on the radio.

  50. I know that the shooting scenes were made to look spectacular for tv and mostly impossible in the real world . I didn’t mind it then and I don’t mind it now. It was one of my favorite shows of all time! And I’m not ashamed of that! In the real gun world it’s nothing like that of course! I looked up a list of known gun fighters and there was actually a Lucas McCain. I’m sure he was nothing like the tv actor

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