10 Things Films Always Get Wrong About Guns

7. Snipers Need Buddies

This is a mistake that's slowly being rectified by based-on-true stories like Jarhead and American Sniper (arguably about the only beneficial thing the latter film is bringing to Western society), but still, it deserves a naming and shaming. You see it as much in action films as you do in video games, actually, where sniping is shown to be easy as pie. How do snipers operate? Why, they just hole up somewhere camouflaged and safely away from the action, all on their lonesome, stare down the sights and fire at their target. In actuality, sniping is a lot more complex than that, with snipers having to take into account stuff like wind direction and even the curvature of the Earth. Which means that a sniper relies much more on maths than on shooting, and those calculations usually come from elsewhere. The idea of the lone sniper is complete hogwash €“ they actually work in pairs, with one wielding the rifle, the other doing the complicated stuff, reloading and spotting targets with binoculars.
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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/