My..erm..friend just got a workprint of Shoot Em Up, the Clive Owen action movie about..well..shooting. Having watched it, my first reaction is “damn, if I’d paid for that I’d be really pissed off right now!”

Like most avid shooters, the standard Hollywood gun cliches are as painful to watch as the ‘hacking’ scenes in Hackers, or any scene from The Net. There’s just something viscerally irritating about dramatizations that get details wrong, whether you’re a forensic tech watching CSI, a computer programmer watching Mercury Rising, or a nurse watching ER, butchering reality for dramatic effect just seems wrong.

Us gun owners arguably have it the worst of all, as we suffer the most widespread cliche in modern cinema: guns. The boundless magazines, the inhuman accuracy of the hero, the stupefying suckitude of the villain’s aim, the bullets sparking off car bodies and helicopters without so much as a dent, pieces of wood and glass bottles and wooden tables providing effective cover, and of course the one-shot-one-kill properties of a chest shot.

Now imagine, if you will, a movie that combines two hours of these cliches with the most juvenile, one-dimensional, over-the-top gun control advocacy to hit the big screen since Liberty Stands Still. What you have imagined is Shoot ‘Em Up, albeit with the addition of Monica Bellucci, Persephone of The Matrix Reloaded fame and the only reason I made it to the end of this suck-fest.

For those of you considering spending a couple tortured hours with this movie, let me urge you to re-watch Star Wars: Episode I instead; you’ll suffer just as much, but at the end you’ll be able to channel your need to take a shotgun to Jar-Jar into something useful, like, I dunno, a trip to the range…

Finally, as a public service to anyone who actually did see this movie, I’d like to dispel a few gun-related myths that could easily get you killed:

• Semi-automatic handguns like the Eagle used by Mr. Hertz lock open with the slide back and the chamber exposed when the last round in the mag is fired. If you find yourself attacked by a man wielding an Eagle, do not count his first six shots then assume he’s out like Mr. Smith did; not only is the mag capacity considerably more than six rounds, but if he’s out of ammo his slide will be locked back, and if it’s not, well, you fail.

• Semi-automatic handguns like the Beretta 92F and the Taurus PT-92 used by Mr. Smith and some of the bad guys have a maximum magazine capacity of 15 rounds, unless using a high-cap mag which extends beyond the bottom of the pistol. If you find yourself under attack by dozens of guys in black leather jackets, you’ll need considerably more than one magazine to put them all down.

• While some experimental guns with biometric locks like the ones in the film have been fielded, none are reliable enough for defensive use. Gun control advocates have been trying to require this sort of ‘safety feature’ on guns for quite some time, while mysteriously exempting police units from the requirement, knowing as they do that such a requirement makes guns considerably more expensive and much more likely to fail when needed most. If you do find yourself out of ammo and in need of another gun, taking a fallen bad guy’s biometrically-secured handgun as well as his thumb is probably not a good idea, as it was probably the failure of the biometric lock that got the bad guy killed in the first place.

• Heating cartridges in a fire until they go off—so-called “cooking off”—will result in the powder igniting and expelling the bullet from the casing, but absent a locked breech and a rifled barrel to direct the force of the ignition and stabilize the bullet, the effect will be more like a black-cat going off, and most certainly would not penetrate a human chest cavity at one meter, as depicted in the film.

• If you shoot a bad guy in the chest, he will not immediately drop dead. Depending on where you hit and what your bullet does once inside the chest cavity, he may keep coming for several minutes before he even realizes he’s been shot. The scene at the end of the film wherein Mr. Hertz takes three 9MM JHPs to the chest is among the more accurate of the film, as even those devastating hits don’t knock him down permanently.

• The Second Amendment does not guarantee an individual right to hunt. The taking of animals for sport could be banned tomorrow without running afoul of the Second Amendment. The Second Amendment is not about hunting, with an UZI or otherwise. If you find yourself in a bar arguing against the 2nd Amendment as an individual right and bust out your “right to hunt deer with an UZI” rejoinder, one of two things will happen: a vigorous wedgie or vigorous ridicule; possibly both.

• Fearsome though a 12ga shotgun is, even a close-range hit from one will not propel a bad guy backwards several feet through the air. Per Newton, the force of the bullet (or, in the case of a shotgun, possibly shot) expelled from the front of a gun creates an equally powerful force pushing backward in the direction opposite the projectile (that is, towards the shooter). If the bullet strikes with enough force to throw a 200lb man back several feet, that would mean the gun would recoil with the same force, in which case you could identify 12ga shotgun shooters by their dislocated shoulders and fractured tailbones.

• If you find yourself in bed with Monica Bellucci and a jack-booted thug comes through the door by your head with an MP5 submachine gun, you are going to be shot. If said JBT manages to miss you with every one of his 30 rds, shake his hand, as you have had the privilege of meeting the world’s biggest fucktard (and he’s out of ammo anyway, so you can snap his neck for dramatic effect later).

• “Guns don’t kill people…but they sure help” is a joke, not an argument for gun control. You didn’t even come up with it on your own. Unless your social circle consists entirely of hoplophobes, don’t say stupid shit like that as though it were some sort of cogent argument. Don’t be that guy.

The preceding has been a public service of the Gun Lobby.