A Cool Guide about 12 myths that movies made us believe

It is not a myth that shooting two guns at once looks cool. It looks cool AF.

Right?! Looking cool and being effective are two different things. I know what they went for but really poorly worded that one.

I see we're still sharing this guide of misinformation.

You can aim at two targets. Phone tracing does not take an hour. You can shoot and disable most locks including the one pictured with most calibers that aren't a .22. Grenade pins can be pulled with teeth depending on grenade and whether you're applying tension to the spoon. Gunshot noise is affected by a suppressor, but bullet noise is based on speed, weight, and shape.

You can report people before 24h have passed but the cops may still want you to wait. They do this because they're lazy/don't want to waste time dealing with paranoid folk.

A gun can be completely silenced when built to do so. Generally using subsonic ammunition and not semi-auto.
- Yeah, just pointing out that a suppressor doesn't affect the bullet sound. If it's supersonic, it will still crack.
  
  The can just gives the explosion (gunshot) time to expand and slow down. I am intimately familiar with this concept and have a nearly silent build myself.
  
  Edit: sidenote, if you want to shave off a few more decibels from the noise of the shot, add a small amount of material to ablate inside the suppressor. A VERY small amount of water will do in a pinch but petroleum gels are better. I personally recommend a cleaner gel like medical ultrasound gel, very clean and very effective.
To be fair they said "aiming two guns at once is hardly possible". Means it is with enough practice? Lol. I hate this guide, full of half-truths and misinfo, not to mention completely withholding explanations.
- And they used a picture of Neo. Might as well show a picture of Luke Skywalker and bust the "movie myth" that you can use the force to lift objects

A grenade pin is tight, but if people can open beer bottles with their teeth they definitely can pull the pin on a grenade.

Ok, I know nothing about grenades but from what I’ve seen I imagine there’s a spring mechanism and that is clamping the pin down. So wouldn’t pressing down on the clamp make pulling the pin easy/easier?
- There are different types of grenades.
- Ya, most grenades have a lever called a "spoon" that you press down that relieves some of the tension on the pin, and when you pull the pin and throw the grenade the spoon flies off and ignites the fuse.
They're probably referring to the confidence clip. We used to tape the spoon to the grenade because if the pin got caught on your jacket, you'd have a really bad day. There's actually an extra step before you pull the pin where you sweep your thumb across the spoon to allow the pin to be pulled out. If you just grabbed a grenade and tried to rip the pin out with your teeth, without removing the confidence clip, you'd rip your teeth out.
- Oh ya I forgot about that, it's been like... Close to 20 years

The phone tracing one is misleading. It might take hours for the police to get the location from the ISP (I doubt that), but the phone call doesn't have to be hours long.

Im wondering about the grenade one. You would have no teeth afterwards? does it take a special leverage tool to remove or a supreme amount of burlyness. its not easy for teeth to be pulled out.
It takes typing a single command to trace a call.

What takes time is getting the authorization to the person who has the password permission to issue that command.

Very few people at the phone company are allowed access to those commands.
Are they talking landlines? Because I'm pretty sure if Police already had contact with cell provider they could find where your phone was (within reason) by seeing which towers it is currently pinging off.
I think it's the total time including the warrant order

So reading through these comments and also based on what i already know, it seems like this coolguide is pretty much bullshit.

The Defibrillator thing is very misleading. Yes, a Defibrillator alone cannot restart a heart. You need to do CPR and if you can combine it with a Defibrillator (operated by a doctor or an AED) you actually have a chance of reviving someone (obviously there is no 100% success rate and the person needs to be "freshly" dead).

Well but a defibulator isn't used to restart a stopped heart. You only shock for Vtac or Vfib. When in doubt, turn it on, put the pads on and the machine will say 'shock suggested'. If not just do CPR.
Yeah but this is referencing the movie trope where the person has a fully stopped heart and they shock it back to life. In reality applying cpr is just keeping the blood pumping to supply the brain with oxygen in the hope the body restarts the heart itself. That's why modern defib machines check the nerve impulses to see if shocking it would help. Of there is no heartbeat, it won't help and will refuse to shock. Once the body restarts the heart but the rhythm isn't correct shocking can help. The shocks also aren't huge shocks where the person violently lurches up and putting in more energy won't help either. The machine checks the rhythm and applies a series of shocks to help the nerves regain their normal pattern and thus tell the heart to pump in the right sequence and speed. Just randomly zapping will probably do more harm than good.

It's pretty nice the emergency defib machines we have all over the place these days are smart enough to help without needing to know how it does their thing. Because 80s and 90s TV and movies have muddied the water quite a bit.
The movies usually show an asystole being defibrillated and that is not done. To the best of my very limited medical knowledge you first need to use CPR and medication to get some electric activity from the heart to defibrillate.

I’m very confused on the grenade pin one.

If you held down the level (not sure what it’s called), wouldn’t the pin be fairly easy to remove? Why would that be harder than your teeth?

I’ve never seen a grenade in person.

Yes, you hold down the spoon and almost all of the tension gets removed from the pin, it's made to be easily pulled with one finger by anybody.

If you're holding the spoon, you can pull the pin.
For real. If it was that hard to pull then people would be dropping live grenades by accident even more than they currently are.
Check out my other comment but I'm pretty sure it's because of the confidence clip. There's actually an extra step where you sweep your thumb across the spoon to allow the pin to be removed from the grenade. After that yeah you probably could pull it with your teeth.... but if you fucked up and fumbled it you'd win the Darwin award.

Really the myth should be about cooking a grenade. Absolutely no way in fucking hell you'd ever trust that fuse to "actually" be 4 seconds. What if it's short and actually 3? And you wait to 2 to throw? Nooo way lmao

I hear the silencer one a lot, and although it's not nearly as quiet as media likes to suggest, they can be much quieter than you expect. There are a lot of variables to play with when it comes to guns and noise.

My neighbor at camp handed me his silenced .22 loaded with subsonic ammo. All I could hear was the action moving back and forth. So clear, I realized I had heard that exact sound because I have the same gun in a different form!

OTOH, it's impossible to get a significantly silent supersonic round down to "quiet", not even close. And none y'all better steal my new band name!

Shame most Americans take the term "silencer" literally. We'll never see sane legislation. Meanwhile, in Europe, I'm told some ranges mandate suppressors, and at best, you're considered a douche canoe blasting away without one.

Going to bite the bullet (heh) and get one on my AR when I can afford (and have time to figure out the tiresome paperwork and fees). The noise is stunning and I'd like to be more considerate of my country neighbors.

Fashion is often very impractical so this makes perfect real sense actually

Also what about aiming both at the same target or using them alternating?

Shooting two guns at the same time sucks whether it is at one or multiple targets.

You can't look down the sights on both at the same time, and the recoil is goofy because you can't line both up with your body if aiming at the same target. So you are either shooting one blindly or two awkwardly.
- What if shooting alternately?
  
  Aim the left, shoot left, aim right, shoot right

Depends on the lock, for example a disecu combination lock can be opened with another disecu combination lock or your hands

It's not a myth that shooting two guns at once looks cool. It looks super cool. Accuracy has nothing to do with how cool it looks.

Padlock shackles haven't been made of iron for around 120 years. They're made of case-hardened steel.

I'm pretty sure you can hear someone who is yelling while skydiving, because my friend has a video of him skydiving and you can hear him yelling in the video. Camera microphones are usually worse at picking up sounds in heavy winds than human ears are.

Some of the others seem suspicious too, but I'm not sure enough to dispute.

The grenade thing depends on the generation of grenade. Also depends on the country of origin. Assuming we are talking about the American M67 one you see in most movies, there are 3 different generations of safeties.

Quick basics of an American grenade- the spoon is the handle looking thing that is sticking out the top and runs along the side. Under it in the head of the grenade is a spring that is always trying to push the spoon off its hinge and make it fly off, while then starting the fuse and the whole bang process. The safety pin (a codder pin with a ring on one side to pull on) runs through the head of the spoon and is held in place simply through binding into its hole/channel by tension provided by the spring. For a little bit of extra safety the end of the pin sticks out about a quarter inch and is bent for a little, but easily straightened and pulled out with the ring (look up a picture and you will see what mean).

The old ones were just the safety pin held in place by the spring/spoon mechanism. But if you had excessive vibration or just enough pressure and you had pre-straightened the safety for pulling ease, it would negate the spring pressure and the safety pin could slip in and out with ease (thus easy to pull with teeth for Rambo effect). People didn't trust it, so it was typical to then use electrical tape to hold the spoon down wrapped around the full body and then a bit extra folded back to make a quick pull tab. To throw: pull e-tape, pull pin, throw. The army then added a secondary safety to the safety. It was this secondary safety clip that held the spoon down to the head, providing constant tension and stopping the vibration loosening issues. They were also intentionally designed to have to get pulled off in opposite directions. To throw: (I am left handed) sweep safety clip left, pull pin right, throw. This was in my opinion the best setup and my favorite of grenade generations. Apparently this was about 50/50 with other others. So the army then came out with their third generation, the "confidence" thumb guard thing. It is a metal flap switch that locks/latches the safety clip onto the pin ring. I thought it was dumb. Most people hate it. But credit where credit due- it is impossible to fuck it up. Now to throw: thumb/sweep up on confidence latch, sweep left on safety clip, pull right on pin, throw.

Since everyone's having fun dunking on these, I might as well have a go and potentially look like a fool in the process. Note, I will be commenting on the accuracy of the chart and assessing whether the chart is correct, not the myth.

Partially-correct. As someone else said, it's very unlikely for you to restart a heart with a defib; they're meant to stabilize a fibrillating heart (when the heart is beating irregularly and too quickly, like a heart attack). However, if you can get a person's heart to start fibrillating by some other method, like CPR, then it can help stabilize them.
Correct. It does indeed take longer than a couple seconds to knock someone out with chloroform. That said, supposedly plenty of other medical anesthetics that supposedly can put you out really fast.
Misleading. Tracing calls is extremely fast, it's getting the proper authorization that takes time.
Iirc this is technically correct; forensic investigation doesn't actually tell you anything about what happened, only what is present now. The explanation is what you get from the evidence. Seems a bit like saying, "guns don't kill, it's the massive trauma resulting from your body trying to stop a tiny lump of lead that's flying at over 1k meters-per-second that kills you" but okay.
Technically correct, but wrong in practice. This is such a widespread myth that cops will sometimes repeat it. Additionally, the time period can be anywhere between 24~72hrs, depending on the person responding. So if someone tells you to fuck off and wait, call and try again.
Correct. >95% of the time the victim is too busy trying not to drown in order to yell or scream. You need air to scream, and if you're struggling to get air, then screaming isn't something you're doing.
Partially-correct. Aiming with two guns is possible, but significantly harder than shooting one. People try to do something hard like splitting their attention to aim at two targets, and then when they can't do it, they assume that it's impossible. No bitch, that's like an archer giving up because they didn't hit the target the first time. Don't let your dreams be memes, gitgud.
Partially-correct. There are some extremely quiet guns out there, and subsonic ammo helps quiet the gun further (bullets aren't breaking the sound barrier, also lower powder load = smaller explosion). However, it's unlikely you'll get a gun down to a "pew pew pew" like in the spy movies.
Almost completely wrong. Firstly, aim at center mass. Yes, it's thicker, but there's also a lot of air in there and the individual pieces of metal are probably thinner. It'll be easier to hit and less likely for the lock to deflect the bullet (hitting a flat-ish surface vs curved one). Secondly, use something other than a .22 pistol.
Mostly correct. If you have headsets then you probably could, especially if they cover your mouth, but otherwise basically correct.
You see that little lever? You're supposed to hold that down before you pull the pin. Dumbass.
Eh, kinda. Depends on the asteroid belt. Planetary belt? They can absolutely be that dense (though they're unlikely to be all that big). Stellar belt? Probably not, or at least ours isn't that dense. That said, it's a big universe out there and we haven't even come close to visiting our neighboring stellar system, so who knows.

Tbh, some of these myths are so widespread and have such a high risk of causing injury from ignorance (like 5 and 6) that it should be illegal to repeat them in a way that portrays them as factually correct in media. However, based on my current knowledge, that's my rundown on the trues/falses.

Technically correct, but wrong in practice. This is such a widespread myth that cops will sometimes repeat it. Additionally, the time period can be anywhere between 24~72hrs, depending on the person responding.

It depends on the situation. I called in a missing person because I had a good reason to believe their life was in jeopardy and the police immediately responded. They ran a rough geo location on the person's cellphone and dispatched an officer to check for them. They would not run a precise geo location without a warrant though, and that would probably have taken 24 hours or more.

Waiting 24 hours to report a person missing isn’t a myth… just a stupid fucking thing that happens a lot and has no basis in law.

You could try to report a person missing immediately but depending on their age, gender, sex, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, economic status, job employment, location, and maybe many more factors, a police/sheriff department might flat out deny a report because they simply can’t do their job right.

It’s not a myth; it is reality and many people encounter this issue. Especially in the ‘70s and ‘80s in the United States, teenagers would often be dismissed as missing and considered runaways. So the fact is you might be forced to wait or have your report completely ignored by the appropriate law enforcement agency.

Nice movie references

The poor potted plant.

Iron padlocks?

As far as the lock one, I have watched the lock picking lawyer open a padlock with a ramset gun 🙄 so yes it does work.

I don't like this, I'd prefer if they provided a source or explanation. "A phone call takes up to an hour to trace"? Really? How do we even trace phone calls? Why doesn't a defibrillator work? It's not movies that taught us that! School taught me that shit!

Why doesn’t a defibrillator work?

In movies (and mostly cartoons), it's often used as a solution to any 'death', so it's more just misleading

For the heart to pump blood, the muscles need to contract in a specific pattern. This is coordinated by a part of the heart using a form of electricity.

When these contractions get out of sync and blood stops being pumped (ex. certain types of heart attacks), we can use a defibrillator/AED to get everything in sync again.

If that is not the cause of the cause of the problem, the defibrillator wont' work.

Neo is a superhero using hacks in a video game world. Criticising The Matrix because Neo is better with guns than any real person is like criticising Superman because nobody can leap tall buildings in a single bound.

I've seen a game show about pulling semi trucks uphill by the teeth, I'm sure an 8kg grenade pin pull force isn't a stretch.

Someone's never played Pistol Whip.

Pistol Whip has an auto aim mechanic. You can disable it in the challenge settings and see how impractical it actually is to dual wield handguns
- I disable it and see how awesome I still am.

The part of a drowning person let me remember this video where a sociopath pushed a drunk woman into a river, then left even after hearing "help i can't swim" https://invidious.adminforge.de/watch?v=LPs7kHIiVZ0

I knew the asteroid one, but it still baffles my mind to this day.

Almost all guns that can cause hearing damage (with repeated firing) without a silencer are still going to cause hearing damage despite that silencer.

It just takes a few more shots to accumulate the same level of auditory damage.

That’s how loud shots are despite the action of silencers. Silencers exist to protect your hearing when you likely only need to fire off one or two shots at most… with such few shots you can avoid the conspicuousness of hearing protection while getting that hit done.