by Dana King
Nick Forte, the protagonist of my PI series, has a bit of a military background, and is old school to boot. His weapon of choice is a classic M1911 .45 caliber Automatic Colt Pistol (ACP). Nick figures, if it was a good enough sidearm to be standard issue for 74 years and five wars, it’s good enough for him. (Some U.S. troops still use the M1911.)
I found myself deep below the city streets of downtown Minneapolis on Monday last September, shoulder-to-shoulder in an underground city occupied by 800 of my fellow blaze orange Minnesotans. None of them were there for deer hunting, though.
The sign on the wall, the one near the line of new arrivals waiting to make their one free phone call, read “Hennepin County Jail.” That was before one of the high-risk inmates pressed his face against the glass of a window a few feet away and peered in at me. Oh, and my aunt. Continue reading
How you decide to use this technology in your stories is up to you, but gun scopes that aim themselves are real and they’re on the consumer market. Not only that, but they can sync up with a pair of Android-enabled goggles looking the other way. Which means, “OK, Google, take out the sentry at the guard post, then tell Chipotle to make my burrito for pick up,” isn’t that far off in the future.
The accuracy rate still isn’t 100 percent, but it’s better than half. The manufacturer is only set up for a handful of rifles, but a little creative license should allow you to stick this tech onto whatever tank-tipper you feel like lighting up. In your stories, of course.
TLDR: Yes, some knives actually have safeties.
Characters switching gun safeties on and off in fiction, usually for handguns, is an easy pitfall for some writers. Not all pistols and revolvers have safeties or even hammers.
But what about knives? They don’t have safeties, right? As it turns out, some do. Continue reading
This guest post comes from Travis Pike. He’s a Marine veteran, a firearm instructor and a writer. The post that follows pokes a little fun at stereotypes in the gun world, but I think his satire can apply to assigning handguns to characters, too. Have fun with it!
~Ben
1. The Revolver
You’re a hipster.
The Writer's Guide to Weapons 