Author Stuart Woods and Gun Nonsense?

D

DaleA

New member
Captain Skeptical (or maybe Captain Gullible---you be the judge) posting here for your amusement.

I am currently reading and enjoying Stuart Woods’ Stone Barrington novels. They are fast, easy, whodunit reads that I would easily recommend to anyone who likes fast, easy, whodunits.

In his book Dirty Works Stuart Woods drops this on the reader:

M-T donned the gloves, picked up the weapon, and examined it. It was a .22 caliber semiautomatic with a slightly thicker barrel than she would have expected. She ejected the magazine and examined that, too. “I’ve never seen one like this. It has no markings of any kind.”
“We took it from a CIA agent in Beirut late last year,” the man said. He took a silencer from the box and handed her that, too. She installed it with a simple half turn. “Very nice,” she said. “An assassin’s weapon-light, easily concealed, and, I’ve no doubt, very accurate, especially with the silencer.”
“It was custom-manufactured for the CIA. Only a couple of hundred were made, according to the man we took it from in Beirut. While it has no manufacturer’s markings and there are no identifying marks on any of its parts, we have discovered that the barrel’s rifling leaves a very distinctive pattern on the bullets fired from it. Part of the inside of the barrel is a freely rotating cylinder, so every time the weapon is fired, a different ballistic pattern is etched onto the bullet.”
“I’ve never heard of that,” she said admiringly. “It’s ingenious.”
“We have also learned that if any American police department runs a ballistics check on one of its bullets, the FBI comparison program will flag it as being very special and highly classified.”
"So, when the police remove the bullet from your traitorous colleague, it will be known that he was killed with a CIA weapon?”
“Exactly. But if you fire more than once, each bullet will appear to have come from a different weapon.”
Click to expand...

Now I know there can be no ‘freely rotating cylinder’ in the barrel that will change the rifling signature for each shot fired but I’m also the guy that didn’t believe in ‘hammer forged’ barrels when I first heard about them. (I thought the noise level and pressure level would have to be insanely high for it to work).

So I’m putting this out so we can have a good laugh at Stuart Woods (wow---does he think we would ever believe such nonsense) or to learn something new myself (wow---more unbelievable firearms stuff!!!)

Your input is solicited.
 
FWIW the 105mm tank gun used by the US and many other countries had HEAT (shaped charge explosive for those not used to the acronym for High Explosive Anti-Tank) with a rotating band so the projectile was not spun by the rifling as the spin would reduce the effectiveness of the shaped charge.

What I find entertaining is " a very distinctive pattern " along with " a different ballistic pattern". Sort seems to be contradictory.
I could almost see this "sleeve" as a muzzle attachment as anything actually in the bore would, I suspect, tend to be a bit ironed out by the rifling. And since we know that bad crowns, i.e. muzzle that isn't consistent, tends to poor accuracy that would be right out. But .22 used for assassinations tend to be at very close range (according to the spy literature) so might not be a problem.
 
So I have been through about 20 or so of Stone Barrington's novels. I don't know, it has been a bunch. Woods gets gun stuff wrong quite a bit. However, if Woods wants to introduce a mythical rotating part of the barrel, given that it is a fictional book, I suppose he could do so. This is obviously a "black" spy gun for which we commoners would have no knowledge if it wasn't for the book, right?
 
I know the book is fiction and the details of the gun are most likely fiction as well. But at the same time I have no doubt that secret government agencies here and across the globe have designed, and actually used some guns that are far from conventional.

When I was a kid Dick Tracy's wristwatch phone was fiction. Today my wife has one.
 
However, if Woods wants to introduce a mythical rotating part of the barrel, given that it is a fictional book, I suppose he could do so.
Click to expand...
Exactly. Writers write about stuff they know little or nothing about. That's in the nature of their trade. No one batted an eye at Edgar Allen Poe writing about traveling to the moon because it was fiction. No one batted an eye at H G Wells fighting creatures from another planet because it was fiction. No one mentioned Arthur C Clarke's three-sided symmetrical aliens because it was fiction. I have read stories where the "bad guy" fired his 30-30 at the "hero" and the buckshot ricocheted with a loud whine. It's fiction.

That said, it does make me shake my head and want to put that stuff down, but it's no worse than the movie "Spawn" where the bad guys shot up a N Korean military base with suppressed weapons that people 20' away couldn't hear. I turned it off.
 
Woods hung on an afterword telling readers not to report errors, "We already know about them." And gun nuts are the worst.
 
There are also writers who know what they are writing about, and have done research, but intentionally write something false or leave something out just so readers cannot duplicate what they wrote in the real world.

I will say this about one thing,

“We have also learned that if any American police department runs a ballistics check on one of its bullets, the FBI comparison program will flag it as being very special and highly classified.
Click to expand...

Good fiction, stupid tactics.

Think about it, if the point it to conceal the origin of the bullet, a simple "no match found" leaves investigators nothing. A result returned "classified" tells them there IS a match in the system, somewhere, and while not directly revealing the origin, does reveal that there is one, and it is known.

Dumb
 
There are two things you might be able to learn from examining a fired bullet.

1. What TYPE of gun it was fired from, based on the characteristics of the rifling. The number of lands and grooves, their dimensions, the twist rate, the type of rifling, etc. If the rifling is unique, then one might be able to specify a particular model. If more than one manufacturer has used that type of rifling or if one manufacturer used it on several models, then you might only be able to narrow it down to a few manufacturers or a few models.

2. What specific gun it was fired from, based on a comparison of the fired bullet with another bullet fired from the same gun.

Realistically then, one might be able to definitively state what KIND of gun a bullet came from without having any idea what specific firearm fired the bullet.

I can think of at least one method that might work to randomly alter the ballistic signature of a barrel with each shot so that it would be extremely unlikely that any two bullets fired from the gun would match, but it would be somewhat different from the method described in the quote.
 
There are also writers who know what they are writing about, and have done research, but intentionally write something false or leave something out just so readers cannot duplicate what they wrote in the real world.
Click to expand...

Or, they do it to protect intellectual property by making intentional mistakes in order to spot when the work has been duplicated elsewhere. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/lesser-known-mountweazel-stephen-chapman

My research partner and I did that on a monograph we wrote in the early 90s. It included a taxonomic list with birds generally down to the genus level. We added in a fictional bird to see if anyone was copying our work. The fictional bird was named after our major professor at the time. The bird's name was Gentriops sp. (the southern coastal turkey, as he was from the Texas coast and his name was Gentry). Two years later, we found where this had been duplicated by another researcher without giving us credit. We did it as more of a prank on our major professor, but gave the other 'scholar' a hard time at the annual conference year after year for him "forgetting" to cite our work.
 
The mapping agency here does that to their maps, to check if the atlas companies are just copying their copyrighted stuff. Small changes, not important ones.
 
Additionally, there are some "wiggle words" almost always used by lab experts when they testify, and those are "consistent with".

The ballistic technician will almost never say "this bullet was fired from a (colt/S&W/ Glock etc) unless it is one they personally fired. They will explain how a certain gun has a certain number of grooves, the twist direction and rate, and how the subject bullet shows a certain number of grooves, etc (and if its the same as the gun, or not) and if its the same they will say the markings are consistent with being fired from X gun. They rarely state it WAS fired from a certain gun, only that it is consistent with being fired from a gun of that type, caliber and perhaps model.

IN testimony, other things may be emphasized, or left out, unless specific questions are asked, and answers required.

Watch My Cousin Vinny, and notice the excellent job the writers did pointing this out in the courtroom sequences. OF course, it is fiction, but it does a good job of illustrating what kind of things CAN happen between witness, and even "expert" testimony and reality.

As to "assassin's guns" they do exist. We rarely see any of them but once in a while we do. Back in the late 60s/early 70s there was an article in one of the gun mags, Shooting Times, I think, but no longer clearly remember the magazine or the date it ran, but I do remember the pistol.

Taken from the Viet Cong, it was a Tokarev that had been modified with an integral suppressor, and a locking catch that held the slide closed until manually operated. Workmanship was crudely finished, but it was fully functional. The article had several pictures. Gun looked wonky but apparently worked well enough.

When writing fiction, things don't have to work, they just have to sound like they might....:rolleyes:
 
As the guy said to Travis McGee about his tax records:
"Some of them are right, some of them are part right, some of them just look like they might be right."

There was a PD that had Glock barrels made with "artifacts" in the barrel to identify bullets fired from duty weapons. Of the department's guns or of individual officer's guns, I don't recall.
 
Well, Stuart Woods is dead now, so he won’t be making any changes in his gun writing skills.

I have enjoyed most all his novels, except the few that were heavy on the partisan politics.
 
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