9. Dropping A Gun Doesn't Cause It To Fire At An Opportune Moment
As seen most memorably in Hot Fuzz, which gleefully uses most of the stupid movie logic on this list regardless of realism ad whether it's appropriate to be occurring within the idyllic locales of a small Southern market town, when Nick Frost's Danny drops his shotgun and it takes of a guy's toes, this trope is actually pretty dangerous. Dropping a gun absolutely doesn't cause it to go off. That would be a spectacularly poor design on the part of gun manufacturers, because as much as humans like to think of themselves as perfect and infallible creatures, we are clumsy as a Marx Brother drunk on an ice rink. So to accommodate the world's butterfingers, most guns are designed so the triggers aren't so loose as to be activated by dropping the firearms. In fact you have to put some effort into pulling a trigger, and most conventional wisdom suggests you're more likely to accidentally fire if you try to catch a falling gun instead of just letting it drop.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
