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Small Arms

Mike T. joins Joe, Toren, and Kevin to talk about small arms — firearms carried by an individual soldier. From the “grenade on a stick” beginnings of the fire lance all the way to caseless ammunition, Caustic Soda covers the history and science of these small arms, and even manages to talk about some of their favorite depictions of firearms in pop culture.

Music: “Pistol Packin’ Mama” by the Andrews Sisters

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12 Responses

  1. Hmm, I have to say Kick Ass was the first comic/movie that came to mind when thinking of superheroes and weapons. I do seem to recall quite a lot of them in that film.

    Nice ep, guys. 🙂

  2. We at Horsetrack Hooligans are outraged!

    HOW DARE YOU NOT GIVE PREDATOR THE RESPECT IT DESERVES!

    *slap* *slap*

    The ‘bald, black guy’ has name. It is Bill Duke. His character was ‘Mac’.

  3. Contrary to Kevin’s assumption about the name “Lugie”, there is a double meaning. A ‘loogie’ is a gob of spit, as in to ‘hock a loogie’.

  4. I was listening to this episode again and thought it would be prudent to mention that if you like gun movies, you have to watch the work of John Woo, particularly his earlier work with Chow Yun Fat.

    Films like Hard Boiled and The Killer greatly influenced modern Hollywood action films (The Matrix for example). Sadly, Woo’s Hollywood films have not been so good but that could have more to do with Hollywood than John Woo’s skills as a director.

    http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000247/

    Also my favourite gun battle in film in recent history is probably from the film ‘No Country For Old Men’. The shoot out in the hotel between Brolin and Bardem is tense and deadly.

  5. THE MEXICAN: The only Julia Roberts movie that I can remember liking, and it has a great celebratory-gunfire scene. In a fairly similar vein, there was a fun episode during the first year of Lovejoy (the old Ian McShane series) that featured a truly wicked pair of duelling pistols… in fact, I was sort of hoping that there would be some stuff on duelling in the actual episode. And maybe a bit of mockery of Equilibrium.

  7. Just to comment about the Russian soldiers, even though there were times on the eastern front that soldiers would lack firearms, but that became less prevalent as the German campaign began to lose momentum and the Russian army became more organised. Though depicted in Enemy at the gates, the one gun to two men, really only occurred with militias that would have been hastily thrown together by officers in towns and cities facing immediate attack. And Stalingrad was really the last time this type of behavior was seen.

  8. I can’t believe you went the entire episode without saying “hey Joe, where you going with that gun in your hands?”

  9. Early on, there’s a reference to not using powerful firearms that kill a lot of people. I recall the purpose is mass combat is attrition, not deaths. A single dead soldier is one less enemy in the field. A single wounded soldier occupies his comrades, medic, evac, doctors, etc and may not return to combat. So, a single wounded soldier removes much more than one man from the conflict. The Geneva conventions, I recall, also govern acceptable weapons for the same reason: You want to injure the enemy but not so bad that you can’t engage in trade a few years later (consider the injuries from chemical weapons in WWI).

    Afterthought: A SGT in US ARMY basic training told me mustard gas was the reason for limiting facial hair, as it stuck. The whole world changed its military hairstyles…