SHOOTING IN LITERATURE

Most extraordinary ideas prevail amongst writers as to shooting in general and especially pistol shooting.

One novelist makes his hero see “a flame zigzagging in the darkness,” he, not troubling to ascertain who was carrying the light, friend or foe, without hesitation “drew his pistol, took an aim of a good thirty seconds’ duration and fired straight at the flame.”

To aim “straight at” a moving object is the way to miss it, and if the aim is taken for thirty seconds the hand gets so shaky that a miss is certain, but most marvellous thing in literature, the hero does miss.

Solomon said, “There is nothing new under the sun.” He was wrong. The author who makes his hero miss is absolutely unique; in all other literature the hero never misses, none of Homer’s heroes miss, nor does David miss Goliath nor William Tell miss the apple nor Robin Hood the deer.

This unique hero takes an even longer aim, later. He hears a horse galloping towards him and aims for ten minutes at a point two inches above where he expected the horse’s head to appear round a rock. I suppose he aimed two inches high so as to allow for the fatigue to his arm during the ten minutes’ aim, causing it to slightly sag down.

I expect the next novel I read, the hero, knowing his enemy will arrive in a month’s time, will keep an aim well above the railway station till he arrives.

Evidently the idea is the longer the aim the more accurate it is, forgetting that human muscles and eyesight tire, and that fast moving objects cannot be hit with a stationary aim.

I have known a stag turn and go the opposite direction whilst a man was aiming at a tree he expected it to pass.

It is amusing how, in a play, the hero after he has made the villain desist by pointing a revolver at him, contemptuously throws the revolver on the sofa and walks away.

It never occurs to the author of the play, or the actor, that the villain would instantly seize hold of the pistol and turn the tables on the hero.

After the hero has covered the villain with the pistol and has been applauded the “situation is over” so he throws away the revolver or puts it back in his pocket and there the incident ends.

In one play the hero gives a loaded .44 revolver as a keepsake to a small child.This sort of thing is merely ridiculous and does no harm.

But harm is done if an actor through ignorance shoots another actor.

I have twice seen such an accident on the stage. Once a man blinded another in both eyes, and in the second case in one eye, by firing blank ammunition right into the other’s face at a few feet distance.

Men have been killed, one only a short time ago, by having the wad of blank ammunition shot into them. In one case the gun had several wads crimped hard into the shell so as to make a good loud bang when fired.

One man in this play was supposed to come across his enemy, and as the latter fled, to shoot him. The actor, who I believe said he had never shot a gun before, put the muzzle against the other man’s back when he fired and killed him.

He had been told that it was blank ammunition and he thought it could do no harm. This is the cause of all such accidents. Being blank ammunition it is considered to be harmless.

Old ladies are laughed at when they scream and hold their ears when a man begins to “brandish” a revolver on the stage or poke about with a gun, with his finger on the trigger. But the old ladies are quite right to be alarmed.

There is no knowing what may happen when a man ignorant of firearms, has one in his hands, even if it only has blank ammunition.A very favourite attitude with actors is to bang the butt of their rifle on the ground and then put both hands over the muzzle, but in this case if the rifle “explodes,” it is only their own hands that they injure.

For the safety of others this is the best thing they can do, before someone else gets hurt.

Before being allowed to fire blank ammunition on the stage, a man should be properly instructed in the safe handling of firearms.

Shooting blank ammunition on the stage is always a risky job. People are so huddled up, that it is difficult to appear to shoot at a man without shooting close enough to him to injure him.

If the gun is fired over the man’s head, it may set the flies on fire, burn the eyes of someone in a grand tier box, or the limelight man.

It is a case of “save me from my friends” when a writer who is ignorant of shooting matters tries to extol someone’s marksmanship.

We read “the anti-aircraft guns at once began to bellow forth defiance. The shooting was wonderful and it was only the hardest luck that they did not wing an enemy.”

As the number of shots is not mentioned and the element of luck introduced, it is not possible to analyse this shooting, but another writer is clearer. He says “he got within fifty yards, well within point blank range, and fired 117 shots and the enemy was then observed to be leaning forward, so it was apparent that he had been winged.”Now here we have all the facts necessary to work out a simple rule of three problem.

As 117 shots are to one shot, so is fifty yards to X (the distance the adversary must be off to enable him to be winged, with a single shot).

This makes X equal 15.381 inches.

As to kill is about three times as difficult as to wing, divide by three, this gives 5.127 inches as the longest range at which it is possible to kill a man with a single shot, “which is absurd.” Q.E.D.

Another novel writer made use of one of my books very effectively to describe the duel, with all details correct, except that he made the distance between the duellists five yards, and they missed each other twice at this distance!

Allowing for each duellist three feet from where he stands to the end of the muzzle of his pistol they would have only three yards between the muzzles of their pistols. The writer must have either been unacquainted with French metric measures (I gave twenty-five meters as the duelling distance) or else he confused it with a sword duel.