Rename: I Just Shot Marvin In The Face

Left The Safety Off, or, if what we're aiming for (hah) is more along the lines of "writers have no sense of gun safety", Left The Safety At Home.

Left The Safety At Home does nicely convey an extreme level of disregard for gun safety (though I guess someone could read it as an incomplete football team).

That's going to get confused with Not With the Safety On, You Won't.

edited 22nd Jun '10 1:07:43 PM by Fighteer

Did Not Pass Gun Safety.

I've been thinking - as an experiment, anyone mind if I try soft splitting the page into "Did Not Do The Research"-character-shoulda-known-better examples and regular What An Idiot examples? The later may or may not include actual Accidental Shootings, won't know for sure till it's tried.

If you want to try soft-splitting I would not object.

For the Did Not Do The Research side, I just saw a good example in the first season of Bones. Booth, preparing for a raid with a crowd of agents, was holding his gun while putting on a bullet proof vest - with his finger on the trigger even. Another character walks right past him while he's doing this, in the line of potential fire, and he still doesn't notice he's doing it. Not only is he now an FBI agent, he was an Army Ranger sniper before.

I don't think that those should automatically be considered Did Not Do The Research, since it's only the writer's fault if they specifically wrote a stage direction that says "Booth holds his gun with his finger on the trigger while putting on his vest." or something similar. I think that most times it's going to be safe to assume that things like that are happening because the actor isn't thinking about gun safety rules, or doesn't know them.

A soft split between "character is frackin' clueless " and "character should know better" would be less contentious, I think.

edited 23rd Jun '10 7:03:05 AM by Madrugada

Yeah, that makes sense.

Mada, that seems reasonable on its face, but as I'm trying it, I'm finding several examples that are cops mishandling guns deliberately Played for Laughs. I know "authors intent" is a difficult card to play but there's quite a lot of obvious cases where the mishandling of the gun is deliberate because the expected consequence (accidental discharge, usually) follows. Putting The Three Stooges (not an actual example but a fair reference) into a cop uniform and seeing them mess up with guns is different from seeing cops in Rambo blatently ignore the rules with no lampshade. Likewise, there's a difference between the later and a cop's bad gun safety being used as a plot point on Law And Order or CSI.

edited 23rd Jun '10 9:08:24 AM by Elle

Hmmm. I hadn't thought of that. Damn. It would have been such an elegant solution. Three way soft split? Character is clueless; Character should know better; character should know better,but it's deliberately used for a gag? No, that doesn't really work either.

• Comedy/clueless;
• Comedy/should know better;
• Serious/clueless;
• Serious/should know better?

That's the way we'll probably end up splitting them into subtropes eventually anyway.

edited 23rd Jun '10 9:31:56 AM by Madrugada

Four-way-split sounds way too complicated.

Here's my counter proposal:

- Character should know better, not Justified, not Lampshaded, may be Did Not Do The Research by either the Writer, actor, director, etc. - No Gun Safety

- Deliberate Lack of gun safety Played for Laughs: Shouldnt Run With Guns

- Deliberate Lack of gun safety played for drama, usually involving an accidental shooting: I Just Shot Marvin in the Face.

...I'm not entirely happy with that either. The comedy version usually involves the guns being accidently fired too. The only one I'm firm on is the first one. In a follow up post I'll try listing which apply where.

I thought the proposal was to split it between "Characters who are said or implied to have gun training mess up the safety rules." and "People with no gun experience blatantly mishandle guns." Just add in a page for "Gun safety is blatantly ignored to the point of parody and/or laughs" and you got it. to summarize

1. Character who should know better (due to implied, said, or shown gun training) screws up on gun safety
2. Character who has no training with guns blatantly disregards gun safety
3. Lack of gun safety is played up for parody and/or laughs (for example, the current page image)

How's that look?

edited 23rd Jun '10 9:53:26 AM by Twilightdusk

Twilight, regarding "Character who should know better (due to implied, said, or shown gun training) screws up on gun safety", compare these:

• In Ed Wood's classically-bad Plan Nine From Outer Space,there is a scene where one of the cops scratches his head with the barrel of his revolver. The possible consequence to himself, should his gun go off, would not only be hideous but poetic, as someone who would do that in the first place obviously wasn't using his brains for much to begin with. The actor who played the cop later said he was testing to see if Wood, who rarely did second takes, would notice or care (he didn't). Characters in the film also tend to wave their guns like they were pointers; at the yearly bad movie festival B-Fest, it is traditional to yell "BANG!" whenever this is done.

• An episode of Law And Order - Special Victims Unit has Olivia telling a story about a fellow cop with asthma staying up for two days straight on a stakeout. After the stakeout ended, he went home and crashed. Later, he woke up because of an asthma attack, reached for his gun instead of his inhaler while half-asleep, and killed himself. Aside from apparently having a gun-shaped inhaler, it seems that the cop forgot to unload his gun when he came home.

One highlights the character screwing up, one highlights the director screwing up.

edited 23rd Jun '10 10:17:00 AM by Elle

Both are examples of "Character should know better," the first one retains the note that the actor did it to test the director. It was left in in the final cut, meaning we have a character who is a cop blatantly disregarding gun safety.

edited 23rd Jun '10 10:21:46 AM by Twilightdusk

But one is acknowledged as a screw up by the story and one is not. In one the audience, even those who don't know the subject, know what went wrong, and in the other only people who know gun safety will notice. One treats the police officer the same as if he were doing it correctly, one does not. One is Did Not Do The Research / They Just Didn't Care, one is not. Do you understand the point?

Late ninja edit: And one belongs in Guns Do Not Work That Way and one doesn't.

edited 23rd Jun '10 4:03:46 PM by Elle

I understand that there's a distinction, but to someone watching who doesn't know what went on behind the scenes, it's still a cop scratching his head with his gun.

Well I say it's splitable and you say it's not - can we get some third and fourth opinions here?

Maybe it only feels like it needs to be split because it's hard to figure out a name that encompasses all the different ways bad gun safety can be played (and potential clarity problem with 'gun safety' is that it means both a set of handling rules and an actual mechanism, and it's hard to play with that in the title without conveying incorrect meaning). Otherwise, mixing examples of potentially or actually catastrophic gun handling isn't necessarily bad...I don't know. I like sub-categorizing, but I feel this could get too granular with too few examples...played for laughs and the gun fires...played for laughs and someone gets shot...played to reveal the character's incompetence (like, maybe they say they're good with guns and then reveal they aren't by accidental discharge)...played for drama with shooting...played for drama without shooting (tension because live muzzle is waving around)...etc. There's so many ways to play general bad gun handling, and guns feature so heavily in entertainment these days.

edited 24th Jun '10 12:50:09 PM by MoCellMan

oh yeah, also, played for laughs until some gets shot, then it's drama. I believe there's some trope for making the audience laugh so the instant something terrible happens, the shock is heightened.

The examples thing is the main reason. I doubt you could pull up 3 examples of "The actor deliberately messed something up to see if the director would catch him."

That's Completely Missing The Point. It's only the part that makes it blatently obvious that They Just Didn't Care.

Here is the relivant point from the trope description:

Many writers, actors, artists, and directors, however, do not know these rules. What results from this are scenes where characters are doing things they shouldn't, such as placing their fingers on the triggers of their weapons when not about to fire, or pointing their weapons at people who they are not trying to shoot. This is particularly troublesome when these people are supposed to be experienced experts with lots of experience with their weapons.

More:

• Sora No Woto has an Inferred I Just Shot Marvin In The Face instead of an Inferred Holocaust. Episode 12, like in graduation ceremonies helmets were tossed into the air by the troops upon learning they don't have to fight. It's all well and good until you spot loaded rifles up in the air with the helmets...
• Early in Cowboy Bebop, Spike loads his handgun and then points it directly at his partner for no reason. Jet, a freaking former cop, fails to comment.
• The way they handled their weapons in First Blood, John Rambo could've just as easily sat back and let the sheriff and his deputies kill each other in friendly fire accidents. (fingers on triggers, sweeping muzzles through heads and chests, etc.).
• In Independence Day, during the Gondor Calls for Aid scene, specifically the bit in Iraq with the British soldiers, one of them can be seen holding his sidearm for no apparent reason while looking at the map, with his finger clearly on the trigger, and the barrel pointed directly at one of the other officers.
• Watch very closely as Luke Skywalker first ignites his lightsaber in Star Wars: A New Hope - he doesn't know how long the beam is and yet is pointing it at Obi-Wan.
  • The offender here is Obi-Wan who handed a fearsome weapon to a completely untrained person and didn't even duck out of the way when he realized he made a stupid mistake. If your weapons instructor doesn't tell you proper handling procedure, the negligence is his, not the untrained person's.

• scroll through several dozen listed aversions*

• Oddly enough, in Deadliest Warrior, one of the former Green Berets mentioning the fact that he could counter a combat roll with a gunshot, mimed the aiming and said "bang" with his finger on the trigger. Note, this was a former Green Beret, meaning he had this hammered into him by the time he actually fought (and he did fight in the first Gulf War).
• As much as Myth Busters like to stress safety as top priority, in the gun slinger myths (You can pull out a gun, drop a coin at shoulder height, and fire 4+ times before the coin hits the ground), Kari displays the revolvers they will be using. Except she was holding the trigger for all guns shown, even when not demonstrating the single-action only of one of them.

All of these examples have the fault occurring without a viable Lampshade, Justification or corresponding karma coming back to shoot the offender in the face - the mistakes are not intentionally written into the character. (clarification: written in and demonstrated as mistakes).

edited 24th Jun '10 12:54:01 PM by Elle

...Even the Cowboy Bebop example?

Uh-huh. You could try arguing the point from character motivation interpretation, but it wouldn't be an example of what I'm trying to say if Jet had chewed Spike out, or something had happened to show why it's a bad idea.

Your edit clarifies things a bit. I still don't think it's tropable, it's just the same as what we've discussed, Without a lampshade.