Sunday, November 6, 2016

Black Hat Gatt


The graphs on gun usage in this Economist article are neat.  Gathering info from the Internet Firearms Database.  It's cool to chart the popularity of the Beretta 92 after .mil adoption and getting featured in some action movies in the 80, then dropping off in popularity as the luster of the wonder-nine faded, plus other reasons.    Maybe if more cop shops had adopted that gun instead of the Glock types we'd see more Berettas reflected in the cinema.

LOTS of WWII milsurp German stuff in the 70s, then a fall off.  I guess we had more Nazis in movies in the 1970s.

But it got me thinking about gun play tropes.  In cowboy movies the bad guy wears a black hat.  The trope goes.  There are others, like, back-shooting, throwing sand in an opponents face during fisticuffs, etc...

But in more modern genre's like gangster or cop shows or whatnot...  Is there a black-hat gun model, ever?  If you were to film a movie in 2016, what gun do you give the villain to reinforce he IS the villain?  Is there such a thing?  A good guy gun model and a bad guy gun model?  There is the bad-guy gun grip is some movies, holding a pistol sideways to indicate the wielder has ties to an urban street gang.  Terrists and commies have AKs in modern war movies, yes yes, I know.  I was thinking more along the lines of a pistol model, I guess.  What handgun is preferred by the bad guys, and what is preferred by the good guys? 

Bad guys strap on Glocks, and the good guys have a 1911?  Oooo, too easy.  And probably not true. 

5 comments:

Tam said...

U.S. Marshals.

azmountaintroll said...

Desert Eagle in .50AE has a "bad guy gun" rep.

Old NFO said...

Or a Mac 10 or Ingram.

Will said...

The MAC/Ingram models, although it started out as a good guys gun, in McQ, with John Wayne. Lousy guns. They make it difficult to hit the broad side of a barn, from the inside!

Counter Jockey said...

AKs of course. AUGs and MP-5s for sophisticated criminals. M-16A1s for random evil military types,