Some of these are wrong.
Tracing a call is instant. It took longer back in the days when there were physical switches, but that’s been a long, long time ago.
Silencers can make a gun nearly as quiet as the movies, in limited cases. Something like a subsonic .22 will be about as lout as a golf clap. A 5.56x45mm rifle will be hearing-safe, but only barely; it’s still going to be very loud, and will def. sound like a rifle.
You can shoot some locks off. You’re not shooting through the shackle, you’re disrupting the locking mechanism that keeps the shackle closed. It’s still unsafe; you’re going to have ricochet and spall going everywhere.
Tracing a call is instant. It took longer back in the days when there were physical switches, but that’s been a long, long time ago.
Yup. Back in the days of analog phone exchanges, you literally had to send a guy to check electrical connections between lines. Which is why it took time and which is why they encouraged the people to keep on the line as long as possible.
Digital exchanges added call tracing as a design requirement. Everything gets logged. Even if you spoofed or blocked your number, the phone company knows what you did. They are the Phone Company.
To add to this a bit more:
Generally, if you want to shoot a lock (or door frame hinges) off, you use a shotgun with special breaching rounds.
Various forms of these have been and still are used by various Militaries, but more often SWAT or equivalent type units.
The general video gamey / movie portrayal of how this works is usually wildly exaggerated / inaccurate though, usually with pistols at moderate ranges.
Conceivably you might also be able take a door lock/hinges apart with an anti materiel rifle, but this would be wildly impractical.
I think the idea of just shooting the lock off came about from the idea that our character had nothing else available. Like what average street criminal goes about with breaching rounds? And in the movies its often in a pinch. Breaching rounds are used by military and swat because they are equiped and prepared for that possibility, just like a professional theif is equiped with lock picking tools instead of a glock (or at least their glock isn’t used on the locks).
The default scenario that comes to mind when I think of shooting a locked door open is to put a bunch of bullets into the door around the latch and then kicking the door to smash the now-weakened latched part off. That seems like a reasonable approach to me, especially as a desperation maneuver.
It’s gonna depend on the lock, too. Most locks most people buy are gonna have shit build quality. Some literally so bad that you could just shoot straight through it and not just disrupting the locking mechanism (in the way that some quite a bit stronger locks can be disrupted with, for example, a rubber mallet) but literally destroying it. Others (a minority) might be so strong that a typical gun has no effect at all and the infographic actually gets it right.
Pretty sure chloroform is wrong too.
Chem teacher had some and one kid stupidly took a whiff. She dropped like a sack of potatoes. She woke up in a few seconds but yeah - that shit was instant.
I guess it might take 5 minutes to get enough to be out for a few hours.
Here’s what I can find that gives a better answer. Above 100ppm, you’ll rapidly start feeling dizzy. But chloroform is also highly volatile, so you would need to have a rag soaked in chloroform just before attacking someone, rather than lying in wait for a few minutes to a few hours. Plus, if you get that concentration too high, you can accidentally kill someone.
So if you’d been hiding in someone’s car for 10 minutes, that rag might have lost enough efficacy that it would take a few minutes. Alternatively, if the person in the backseat doused the rag just before attacking the driver, it might be nearly instant.
Supersonic bullet still makes a crack. When you fire subsonic you can get just the sound of the metal bits hitting each other. Whoever is interested look up what an MP5S with subsonic ammo in a firing range sounds like (the S is important in this search)
It’s still louder than just the bolt cycling; you’re hearing the gas escaping at high speed, but subsonic ammunition through a silencer is definitely significantly quieter than supersonic ammunition. One of the very, very few positive things about .45 AARP is that it’s always subsonic, so it’s easy to get it very quiet, as long as you have the slide locked so that it doesn’t cycle. (IIRC Knights Armament Corp made a .45 for SOF that had a locking slide.) Videos aren’t great for hearing what a silenced firearm really sounds like due to the way that most microphones compress sound; they end up sounding very different IRL.
I’ve been at the range when some other people were testing out a night-fighter rig with .300 AAC and a silencer; it sounded like they were shooting a .22.
I’d love to get a silencer for my Ruger Mk. IV, because that’s one that will get very, very quiet with subsonic ammunition. I also want to get a silencer for my AR-15, mostly because that sharply reduces the amount of smoke you have to deal with at night matches.
Shooting two guns at the same time does in fact look cool. That’s not a myth. Hitting two targets with two guns at the same time is really hard though.
Maybe but I suspect you can’t even control direction well enough to do that.
Supressing fire is all about distraction and area denial. You can defintely fire two handguns accurately enough to do that. You might not get all yours shots in the 10 ring but you could deny access from one direction of a street for example.
This one seems the least believable to me, but I admit I have almost no experience shooting guns. Maybe you won’t be super accurate, but it would work if you were going for suppressing fire against multiple bad guys while trying to get to cover or something.
Defibrillator:
Weeeell, not exactly. A defibrillator is essential to restarting a heart under specific conditions, and greatly improves the odds of survival to discharge. If your patient is already wired up and you see them go into a shockable rhythm, you can go ahead and shock them immediately. Otherwise, you’re going to need to do some CPR to prime the heart before you deliver the shock. At that, it’s worth noting that not all rhythms are considered shockable (that is, experience a clinical benefit from being shocked), and asystole (flatline) is not among them. Source: am paramedic.
The lock: depends. Notice they said a small bullet. A 12 gauge slug can change a lot of facts about a lock in a hurry. I can’t say it would blow a lock clean out, I think the mythbusters tried it with mixed results, but it’s sure as shit take care of a padlock.
Aiming at two targets: more of a shitty technicality, but if you’re using a shot load in a shotgun, it’s perfectly viable to aim at multiple targets (in a target dense environment) at once. Your aim just has to be generally correct.
Tracing a call: bullshit, especially with cell phones. Modern dispatching centers can generally triangulate a 911 caller’s position (if they’re in range of multiple towers) in under a few minutes, it’s a thing. If 911 can do it, you just know the feds can. Also, phone companies and phones keep records of what device pinged what tower and when, people have been convicted off of that data.
I would like to add that a suppressor can render certain specialized firearms nearly silent if they are used in conjunction with subsonic ammunition. A suppressor can deaden the sound of the initial explosion, but a supersonic bullet will continue to create a sonic boom as it flies through the air. A subsonic round doesn’t create a sonic boom and as a result nearly all of the sound of firing comes from the initial explosion. If that explosion is well sealed and is funneled through the right supressor, nearly silent operation can be achieved. A good example of this is the Welrod used during World War Two, which was quiter than an airsoft gun and was only really audible at point blank range.
TLDR, how quiet a gun gets with a suppressor is determined by the ammunition, the type of firearm, and type of suppressor. Suppressed gunfire can range from as loud or louder than a nail gun to as quiet as a sneeze.
Worth noting that while a nail gun is pretty loud (if you’ve ever been around them without hearing protection), it’s still nothing on being near an unsuppressed gunshot. If you’ve never been up close when even a pistol is shot, it’s much louder then you’re imagining, and louder still than you’ve just adjusted your imagination to. Rifles are louder again.
It’s worth noting that nearly none of the people you see testing suppressors online use a pistol with a slide that is locked so it doesn’t cycle, shooting through a suppressor that has the right type of “lube” applied, with rubber wipes at the very end to let the bullet through then reseal the suppressor for a few shots, before they’re completely shot out.
You don’t get a lot of silent shots, and you’ve got to rack the slide yourself for each of them, but they do get quite a bit quieter than the suppressor mythbusters think they do, running their dry, open suppressors in semi auto.
Also, phone companies and phones keep records of what device pinged what tower and when, people have been convicted off of that data.
To me this is why that point is especially misleading, the movie trope is that as long as you hang up the phone soon enough they can’t find you, but that’s obviously not how it works at all.
It is how it used to work back when these tropes came about.
Here’s an interesting video on the topic
My issue with the two guns thing is that the “myth” they present is that it looks cool. Which is subjective, and for many people it does look cool. You’re unlikely to hit with any accuracy, but you’ll look cool missing.
My issue with the two-guns one is that they use stormtroopers as shorthand for being a bad shot. The only time they were “bad shots” was in A New Hope where they were under orders to be bad shots. They were supposed to let the rebels escape on the Falcon, there was a tracking device on it.
Pretty sure that’s mostly a retcon and it’s actually just plot armor preventing the stormtroopers from aiming.
The lock: There are rounds made specifically for this https://clucas.com/ammunition/hatton-round/
Aiming at two targets: Only if you’re Jerry Miculek …
A defibrillator is for a heart that is in fibrillation, which is a jumbled, ineffective vibration, NOT a flat line.
I’m here to learn how many of these truths are actually just myths of their own!
A stopped heart can actually be started with bullets fired from two guns with silencers.
They used a picture of a guy who canonically has techno-jesus powers for the two guns example. This is like showing a picture of Superman and saying “Actually, people can’t leap tall buildings in a single bound”
