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Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy
Star Wars Hit Probability Equation: The probability of a bad guy hitting his target is equal to the inverse of all bad guys present plus the cube of the number of good guys present (plus one) plus the number of Jedi present (plus one) to the 10th power.

Stormtrooper: I don't know, I just feel like we all have really great aim until the second we put on these helmets...
College Humor

Brigadier: No casualties?
Turner: No, sir. All well. Fortunately Vaughn's jackboots couldn't... couldn't shoot a flying elephant.
Doctor Who, "The Invasion"

I don't know what all the fuss is about. Vogons are the worst marksmen in the universe.

When only the Bad Guys suffer from A Team Firing. Also called The Principle of Evil Marksmanship. The good guys (the non-Red Shirt ones, at least) can stand in the middle of the firefight and never get hit, and can pick off any bad guy with even the most casually-aimed shot.

Extra points if the bad guys first demonstrate impressive accuracy on a range. Eric Kriegler, from the James Bond film For Your Eyes Only, springs to mind.

The trope is named for an actual (optional) rule in the GURPS tabletop roleplaying game, which in turn is based off of a common misconception of Stormtrooper accuracy in Episodes IV and VI. (Get real marksmen and the complaints will be directed to the hero's Improbable Aiming Skills, not Stormtrooper inaccuracy.)

To be fair, in many cases the combatants are forced to Quick Draw or even shoot from the hip, which would make hitting even a stationary target difficult for anyone, regardless of their marksmanship under normal circumstances.

Dodge The Bullet is the inverse of this. For the bladed weapon variation, see Never Bring A Knife To A Fist Fight. See also Where Did They Get Lasers. Opposite number to Improbable Aiming Skills. The use of More Dakka can either overcome this, or make it even sillier. When the bullets don't just spray around the target but consistently hit where the target was a moment ago it's a case of Hero Tracking Failure. See also Plot Armor for the reason the bad guys are such lousy shots. This can be a case of Truth In Television - for instance in this video from the Iran-Iraq War several Iranian soldiers fire on a fleeing Iraqi tank pilot for several minutes and hit nothing but sand. Some sources report that in WWII, one out of every two hundred bullets fired hit a target.

Even The Other Wiki has an article on this, called the "Principle of Evil Marksmanship".

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