A few conversations have been popping up on the forum and elsewhere around the web, particularly firearm based sites and forums. It’s on the subject of proper gun handling. Initially we thought, “Hey, maybe the dude is missing an arm or his hand is broken or some other injury is causing him to wield a handgun in that fashion.” Nope.
Just another example of an actor, untrained in firearms handling attempting to look like what he thinks is a “real badass.” Thoughts which came to my mind were watching a monkey trying to reproduce with a football, a football bat and of course a soup sandwich with extra cheese.
Gun handling on The Walking Dead has been the subject of much ridicule over the years. Mounting scopes and not using them, never using sights and just the slop in the handling between muzzling people and holding firearms as if they were afraid of them. Initially we ignored much of it.
After all, the majority of the cast of characters were not trained military or LEO types or even dedicated target shooters. They were normal people caught up in extraordinary circumstances.
The problem with using that as a crutch is that sooner or later, people’s skills have to come up to par or they will not be around very long. If anything we have seen any pretense at skill deteriorate.
It really is a shame because TWD represented one of the few successful shows that depicted regular people using firearms for self-defense. The other really good one was True Blood.
At one time, just the old gun hacks, like your editor would have picked up on this and yelled at our televisions. Now it seems that there are a lot more of us out there who take our shooting and tactics seriously. AMC and a few others will have to step it up if they want to keep viewers.
This post originally appeared at imfdb.com and is reprinted here with permission.