“Where do you put the Bayonet?”
-Chesty Puller, upon seeing a flamethrower for the first time.

In an effort to get myself to use this more, I’m adding a new feature: The weapon of the week. Every week I’m going to take a weapon and throw around some history, trivia, and whatever else comes to mind. Some may be meticulously researched, some may be off the top of my head. Either way, I’ll try to make it entertaining.

And with last night’s U.S. presidential election debates fresh in mind, I’m going with the Bayonet as our first weapon of the week.

Bayonets are kinda weird in that they’re an edged weapon that came about as a direct result of firearms (as opposed to say, a rapier, where introducing gunpowder was one of a handful of reasons for it’s evolution). Even as the arquebus became the musket, early guns were still single-shot weapons with short ranges and long reload times. And where they really sucked was in the defense. Muskets were good for reaching out and touching someone (by the standards of the time, anyway), but once you’d fired off your shot and surviving opponents were headed your way, life would suck.

(Note to self: find out the plural of “arquebus.” Arquebii? Arquebuses?)

Suckage was somewhat alleviated by forming mixed-use companies of musketeers and pikemen. Musketeers would fire a volley and reload while pikemen kept the enemy’s charging and ensuing suckage to a minimum. It worked, kinda, but it was clumsy and felt like it. The solution was to merge the 2 weapons.

Why they’re called bayonets is unknown for sure. Best guess I’ve heard is that they started to first crop up in Bayonne (France, not New Jersey).

The first bayonets were jammed into the musket barrel and called “plug” bayonets. Useful if you could only get off one shot, but it also meant everyone could tell that you hadn’t reloaded and weren’t planning to anytime soon (and if you had reloaded, it probably sucked almost as much to stand near you as in front of you). Some Scots called Jacobites once took advantage of British soldiers armed with plug bayonets by shooting a volley and charging. By the time the British fixed bayonets, they had a couple hundred pissed-off Scots in their midst with swords and shields, making their displeasure energetically known.

The problem: how to get the bayonet the hell out of the way so reloading could happen. The most popular method was called a socket bayonet. This was a blade attached to a twist-lock cylinder that fit over the muzzle of the musket. The blade stuck out to the side or under the muzzle, keeping out of the way of the bullet (and hopefully the hands of the gunner trying to reload.

There were other designs that cropped up over the years, which ranged from the workable (the spring-loaded bayonet, which folded under the barrel. The Chinese used a variant of this design on the AK-47 well into the 1980′s) to the bizarre (a trowel-bayonet, ostensibly designed by someone who figured soldiers would spend more time digging than fighting. While not necessarily wrong, it may well have been a case of misapplied engineering).

By the time multi-shot rifles came around, a trend cropped up of merging the bayonet with a camp knife, turning a weapon into another kind of weapon as well as a tool, because hey, you have to carry everything, and multiuse tools are always handy. The Russians went one step further and rigged up a nut-and-socket system with one of their bayonets, turning the blade and scabbard into a set of wire cutters.

So, that’s my look at the bayonet beyond the political quip. It’s been useful since they showed up, and I think it’s going to be around as long as blades and projectile or even energy weapons exist.

So, last Thursday, Madonna performed a concert at Denver’s Pepsi center. What makes it newsworthy in this instance was performing her song “Gang Bang.” The performance involved blood-splatter effects on the screen and much use of prop guns, at which point she chose to MUZZLE-FUCK THE AUDIENCE ON NO LESS THAN 3 OCCASIONS!

Definition time.

Muzzle-fuck, n. 1). To aim a weapon in the direction of another person the gun wielder (presumably) does not intend to shoot, violating the first law of handgun safety.
see also: “flagging”

The few bloggers who have picked this up are going more towards the possible insensitivity of performing this particular work in Denver, which is a stone’s throw from aurora, where a nutcase who I will not dignify by naming shot indiscriminately into a room full of theatergoers at a midnight premiere of The Dark Knight Rises this past summer.

What disturbs me more is the incoherent babble of a statement she released once news started hitting over how many locals she pissed off with her antics. I literally can’t make heads or tails of it one way or another. What strikes me is this:

“It’s true there is a lot of violence in the beginning of the show and sometimes the use of fake guns – but they are used as metaphors.

I do not condone violence or the use of guns.

Rather they are symbols of wanting to appear strong and wanting to find

a way to stop feelings that I find hurtful or damaging.”

A metaphor can’t kill from a distance, ma’am. Neither do symbols. And it’s a damn shame you don’t condone the use of guns, because then you might have associated with someone who would have filled you in on the fact that you DON’T AIM A GUN OR ANYTHING THAT LOOKS LIKE ONE INTO THE AUDIENCE!

It honestly wouldn’t have changed the number all that much. 3 tweaks to the choreography, only pointing the muzzle at other performers, I would’ve been cool with that. That’s all it would’ve needed. But either nobody on team Madonna brought it up, or (more likely) nobody wanted to press the point with her and risk their job.

Which leads me to the other thing that chaps me about this: the casual use of firearms as art pieces while having no respect for them as tools.

A lot of Americans who don’t interact with firearms regularly have what I call a Lust-Fear relationship with them. The idea (or the symbol or the metaphor, to quote Madonna’s ramblings) is scary and cool and exciting, but the reality is unfamiliar and terrifying. The whole “ooh, a gun.. OHSHITITSAGUN!” reaction.

Unfamiliarity breeds ignorance which breeds fear. The end result is performers who wonder why there’s a slew of paperwork involved in bringing a firearm into their production while simultaneously advocating the Brady Campaign.

Madonna’s not the first anti-gun performer to use them when it’s convenient for her, (I’d go over the laundry list, but it’s a bit depressing) but she is the first to be so in a way that both illustrates her lack of safety knowledge (or willful disregard of it, hard to tell which) and garnered the attentions of the press for a short while about it.

Watching an onstage (or onscreen) gunfight happening can get very frustrating, very fast. Ask just about any operator, and they can probably name a film where they saw a gunfight and their response was a variation on the tune of “fucking bullshit! That never fucking happens in real life!”

I’ll admit to being annoyed at an action movie using the “have a star shoot a few blanks, have a few stunties fall down, instant badass” formula. It has a time and place, I’ll admit, but it just feels lazy.

The unfortunate fly in that jam is that it’s all too often not a case of impossibility, but (occasionally ridiculously) high improbability.

Bullets can (and occasionally do) go damn near anywhere. The axiom that covers this is as follows:

“Firearms are precision instruments by design. Humans are not precision shooters by design.”

There are exceptions, but overall, this applies. The action of a firing gun and the travel of a bullet to the target is a known, quantifiable, and trackable phenomenon that lies well within the boundaries of Newtonian and Einsteinian physics. Then you put humans into the mix and the fucking quantum shows up.

(I realize most of my work is aimed at actors, and I’m bringing in math and science. I’ll try to make it as painless as possible here)

The basic idea of that is that a firearm is designed to send a tiny projectile in a specific path in a specific way, and every variable that a shooter, a target, and the environment brings into the mix affects that path.

Take a laser pointer. Aim it at a spot on the wall. Now see how small a movement it takes to move the dot a foot to one side. Multiply that by all the excitement happening in a gunfight.

(And people don’t believe me when I say pistol shooting is a lot like smallsword)

There is training that compensates for this. But even that only goes so far.

So, getting back to the title of the piece, how this affects performing a theatrical or cinematic gunbattle. There’s a multitude of ways gunshot wounds (hereafter GSW’s) can occur and effect. But for acting purposes, we can distill these down into 5 categories. Organized by severity.

Instant Kill: This is one of the most debatable kinds of GSW’s, mostly for arguments over the definitions of “Death,” “life,” and “instant.” Truly “instant” death for purposes of this category involves massive trauma to the brain stem upon impact of the projectile. In short, the bullet hits a plum-sized target inside the skull, and everything stops.

Instant Shock: Often mistaken for an instant kill, Instant Shock in this case is a GSW that causes enough damage on impact to cause instantaneous loss of consciousness. Short version: getting shot causes enough damage for the victim to pass out instantly and die soon after.

Disabling wound: A wound that causes the loss of use of an extremity or mobility. Major joints and the spinal column are all targets that can result in a disabling wound. Short version: a GSW that renders a limb (or more than one limb) unusable.

Noticed wound: A wound that doesn’t cause loss of consciousness or use of an extremity, but does cause trauma, blood loss, ect. The most “playable” of GSW’s, as the victim is able to continue the scene with the widest range of possible choices, but still noticeably reacts to the wound as it occurs and through the remainder of the scene.

Unnoticed wound: The wound occurs, but is not visibly reacted to by the victim. This may be the result of adrenaline, shock, a supernatural nature to the character, or other reasons. The audience may see the shot occur, or it may be a reveal later in the scene.

As with anything involving firearms, introducing one rule will summon a legion of exceptions, but I’d like to think this at least provides some sort of broad, useable generalization.