Yup. I don't even remember what film I was watching on TV about a month or so ago, and somebody was subduing people at 150 yards with a shotgun. I'm thinking, do these people even know what a shotgun is?
But as for the rest of the discussion here, many good points. I was about to bring up the gunfight at the OK Corral when I saw somebody else already had. People who visit the place are always shocked at how small it is. It's just not that easy a thing to shoot accurately at somebody who's both moving and shooting back at you. Which is, not incidentally, why all these people who talk about how cops should "shoot the gun out of the suspect's hand instead of shooting to kill" or "shoot him in the knee to slow him down," etc., just have no clue what they're talking about. Too many movies, too much TV.
So at least in that aspect, this movie seems to have some intent to depict the big shootout accurately -- lots of shooting with a lot of missed shots. I've read more than one historian saying Wild Bill Hickok was known to come out ahead in so many gun battles specifically because he had the ability to aim carefully and hit a target on the first or second bullet, instead of shooting wildly, and whenever he could, he tended to arrange conditions where that approach was a big advantage. Like in Springfield, Missouri (where I used to live), when he faced off against an opponent from 75 yards away. It's fairly well accepted that this was probably deliberate, because he knew he would be much more likely to get an accurate shot on target to vital organs than the other guy, and he did.
There was another semi-famous Hickok shootout in Nebraska where he had it out with four guys in the street (these things didn't happen nearly as often in reality as they do in the movies, but in this case it did). The accounts I've seen put them as close as 15 feet and no farther than 30. He ended up shooting three of them in the head, for God's sake, which is just unreal if you know anything about how actual gunfights go. (He and the fourth guy were both wounded.) Of course there's no way this happens by accident or by jabbing toward the target with a handgun while you pull the trigger, like Bogey or Cagney in an old gangster film. It happens by careful aiming and understanding your chances of survival are better that way. Not many people can do it.
There's also the "false fire" phenomenon, of course, which is another reason why especially inexperienced people miss. But it's probably enough that somebody's shooting back at you.
Also, the discussion here of "man blown back by gun blast" is worthwhile. It really just doesn't happen. Somebody might stagger backward after being knocked off balance, but that thing you see in movies with people flying through the air is just stupid, even if it's a shotgun. With bullets, people generally crumple and fall, if it's an incapacitating kind of shot. And most people survive gunshot wounds anyway.
Somebody asked what films actually get this right. I'm probably going to have to come back to this discussion at some point once I think about it a little, but one that comes to mind is Unforgiven (Eastwood). It's much better than most, at least, with the shootout in the saloon and also with sniping the slasher down in that canyon. The latter depicts how hard it actually is to hit somebody who's moving from any distance at all. The former is at least an attempt to show how these things go -- there is some historical information on events like this -- but it also hints at the group-diffusion-of-responsibility effect when you have several people with guns being shot at by one person who knows his only chance is to put them all out of action. I'd still rather be in the group, statistically, sure. But there's a tendency for people in a situation like that to think first of personal safety anyway, and in a group, that's exacerbated by the tendency to think somebody else will shoot the lone gunman, and I'm getting the hell out of here, or I'll just put up fire in that general direction. You see this in a different way when people in a group are less likely to take responsibility for helping an injured person than one person by himself is.
Anyway...it's an interesting discussion, and you have to appreciate a film that at least tries to get it (mostly) right. If they'd only edited the "flying shot man" thing out of the final version. I tend to pay more attention to the details of these things than I should, probably because I come from a family of cops and military, and my wife's stepfather is a former sniper who has taught shooting and gunfight tactics for many years. So I get a little too into it, sorry. But the details really are interesting to me.
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