Unplugging the television yet again...

Sometimes I don’t know why I do some of the things I do.

In November of 2006, I pulled the plug on my television and it’s been gathering dust ever since.

I suspect I heard an ad on the radio at some point yesterday announcing that the CBS lineup for Monday evening included the season finale of CSI: Miami. I used to enjoy the show, and it also was the last program I watched before I gave up television altogether for over a year when the first five minutes of an episode aired in late November of '06 so thoroughly disgusted me. I didn’t have to get up at three this morning, so I could afford to watch an hour program that started two hours after my ideal bedtime.

The plot was too curious to abandon, but then again, I am noted as being a curious man. That doesn’t mean I wasn’t shaking my head the entire time.

My only complaints about any of the CSI spinoffs have been the details. Having studied forensic science for a year in high school as a Talented And Gifted student, I know the essential principles and the 'hows' and 'whys' of just about everything that’s done in and for the crime lab. Most of it is as much fun to view as watching concrete hydrate and in reality takes at least as long if not weeks or months – definitely not prime entertainment material. And then, of course, I’m a firearms expert on top of all of it. You could say I’m a rather well rounded nitpicker, and I don’t miss a whole lot of gaffes in shows and movies of this genre.

A few seasons back one episode nearly left me looking for a bridge abutment to repeatedly slam my head against. I recall it had something to do with a Columbine style school shooting plot or at the least just teenage gangsters with guns. I may be remembering two or three separate episodes as one for all I know. It has been a couple of years, and more than one of them has been utterly unreal.

I understand how it can be advantageous to not use trademarked names without obtaining the license to do so, which often isn’t going to be cheap. Several CBS series that come to mind have been quite creative. I think it was an episode of NCIS two or three years ago where a suspect was nabbed because she smoked ‘Llama’ brand cigarettes, and I think the characters in that series often saw news reported via ‘ZNN’. I believe ‘Curveball’ may have been something else that appeared on fictitious television screens on the sets of shows of this ilk, including JAG. On CSI: Miami once a perpetrator in a parking garage was identified by wearing ‘Colton’ brand athletic shoes and the autistic witness presumed that that was the man’s name. Makes sense.

In the particular past CSI: Miami episode(s) I’m reminiscing about tonight, someone was discovered using ‘Death Talon’ bullets, instead of the old ‘Black Talon’ premium personal protection bullets that Winchester used to offer, which now are revised and relabeled as ‘SXT’ and are widely used by law enforcement. The young people involved in this/these episode(s) had been leafing through some magazines…I think ‘Weapons of Death’ was meant to parody ‘Guns and Weapons for Law Enforcement’, though I really did think that ‘Gun Ho’ was rather clever. I don’t know which publication that one was supposed to be mimicking.

I now have a new infamous favorite episode. In the season finale that aired last night, which I was remarkably unimpressed by, one of the new pathologists in the Miami-Dade County Medical Examiner’s Office was shot in the street by a louse who somehow became one of the literal handful in this hemisphere to possess a Glock 18 select-fire 9mm pistol that is capable of automatic fire. I believe most of these exist in Europe, although last I knew a special tactics team for a sheriff's office in Oregon or Washington state had acquired several some years back. The Glock 18 feeds from a rather freakish looking 33 round magazine which extends far below the grip. Otherwise, you’d not be able to tell it from a much more typical model 17 from more than about two feet away. Put a Glock 17 magazine in it, and you probably wouldn’t know any better unless the minute differences were pointed out to you. Naturally, in firing the gun, the muzzle didn’t climb at all and the simulated full-auto firing noise was superimposed over the slide which was cycling at a rate which is definitely at semi-auto speed of one round fired per second or so.

The crime scene investigators discovered a number of empty 9x19mm cartridges atop of parking ramp staircase where the cretin with the Glock 18 had fired from, along with a few dropped ones that hit the ground unfired, which were taken into evidence, along with a curious piece of plastic which they later identified as being a broken piece of the pistol’s grip. Anyone who owns, has handled, or just merely seen a Glock will tell you that isn’t going to happen. Glock is famous for torture testing it's pistols by running over them with large SUV's, among other things. Traditional pistols utilizing removable grip panels, the old steel and aluminum alloy pistols of yesteryear, like the Soviet Tokarev, the Walther, the Luger, or even our own M1911 service pistol known to almost everyone who served in the armed forces until the late 1980's. Even the 'new' M9, known commercially as the Beretta 92FS, is of this nature. The unfired cartridges were said to be heavily oxidized, and later it was discovered that they were manufactured in a Communist Bloc arsenal in the late 1960’s.

Okay, let me get this straight…we have a Glock 18 that fires 9x18mm Makarov? Or we had a ComBloc nation I’m unaware of that was rolling 9x19mm NATO cartridges? Hmmmm….. In a rather unfortunate and ill-fated laboratory analysis, the one unfired cartridge that is not accidentally detonated is found to not only have an extensively corroded head, but also contained black powder. Huh? It came out that a US contractor (the proprietor turned out to be the Glock 18 wielding assailant) in Miami was selling this old military surplus ammunition to America’s allies abroad in part of a ten million dollar contract and Uncle Sam was under the impression this outfit was actually manufacturing new ammo on his behalf and shipping it overseas. Okay, I can see that. But from my own experience, the steel tins that arsenals in second world nations packed small arms cartridges in did an excellent job of keeping ammunition bright and shiny until opened. Those of us who buy mil-surp ammo in bulk are familiar with these tins. Most cartridges in my collection were never packed in an kind of sealed container and I’ve got ones well over a hundred years old that look almost as good as new. But black powder? The development of Cordite and other smokeless propellants was the major key in self-loading and automatic firearms when they were first developed in about 1895 or so. Black powder, a mixture of charcoal, sulfur, and potassium nitrate, left copious amounts of sooty black residue that would clog up any type of automatic mechanism after about five or so rounds had been fired. When the 9x19mm cartridge was developed for the Luger pistol in 1902, no one would’ve thought about putting obsolete black powder in those cartridges! I doubt even the communists would have done that in 1969 when these found cartridges were assembled at an arsenal halfway across the world.

The real kicker was the ‘fused alloy’ sintered metal bullets the local BATF inspector was trying to track down. They appeared to be the sharp conical shape popular with some European 9mm loads through the decades, but the reality is that sintered copper bullets are in use right now as ‘lead free’ and they don’t fragment upon impact, unless perhaps one strikes an inch or more of armor plate. The fused alloy bullets referred to in the season finale were said to either pass through a bullet resistant vest intact as it was 'cold', or to come 'unsintered' and fragment if it hit an unprotected human as they were 'warm'. Really? The heat generated by friction upon firing a cartridge and squeezing a slightly oversized bullet through a gun barrel wouldn't do that? And in Miami, half the time the ambient air temperature is above the 98 degrees that a human body is supposed to be. A solid projectile is very hard on soft ballistic armor. In fact, soft armor is designed to stop a bullet as it mushrooms. Rifle bullets, especially the full metal jacketed military style ones, don't mushroom too well and will fly right through both sides of most ballistic vests. Certain handgun bullets aren't much better. It takes a lot of piles of Kevlar or other aramid to stop the NATO spec Full Metal Jacket 9mm round, which will penetrate nearly as much soft pine as the 7.62mm rifle bullet will! In China, when examples of the 7.62x25mm cartridges and the Tokarev pistols that fire them were 'liberated' from the army and fell into the wrong hands, the Shanghai police had all kinds of misery on their hands. A .30 caliber pistol doesn't sound like much, but when it shoots a hard, non-expanding bullet at a velocity of about 1400 feet per second, it packs quite a punch! The Shanghai police now wear significantly thicker vests to deal with this threat as the ones they once wore did little good against the little Tokarev bullets. The solid copper bullets in use are really meant for range training, not for combat. I've got a feeling they'd be tough to slow down. I sure wouldn't want to be wearing a vest that was to be 'tested'!

The advice I always received as a writer is that a story needs to be believable in order to be readable. If it’s too uninformed or out of touch with reality, it’s not credible and no one who really knows how the world works is going to take it seriously.

An even better example was one installment of Cold Case about three years ago, which involved tracking down a full-auto submachine gun that was used in a crime. If I recall correctly, it was, without them actually disclosing it, a Cobray M-10. The M-10 is a copy of the unsuccessful Ingram Mac-10, a design for a submachine gun similar to the Israeli Uzi that no one of any consequence wanted back in the late 60's. Submachine guns had pretty well fallen by the wayside by then, as select-fire service rifles firing small, high velocity cartridges (i.e.: the M-16) were on the scene. Of course, the Thompson was unwanted by the world's militaries when it debuted after WWI and the 15,000 built mostly sat in the warehouse until WWII broke out and the British wanted every Thompson we could sell them. I've fired an M-10 once, and I didn't care for it. For an automatic pistol (all the copies are, really, no full-auto capability in ones allowed to the general public in the US), it's big and heavy. Cobray solved a problem with a trigger that transmitted shock to the user's finger by slipping a piece of vinyl tubing over the trigger. How classy. In Cold Case, though, we have a Philadelphia manufacturer distributing full-auto M-10 type guns to whoever and some of the production is being stolen after it's shipped, and the detectives are trying to trace the crime gun back to it's source. Along the way, they backtrack to a dealer at a gun show where one previous owner claims he bought the gun. So, and this is too good to not scream out loud at, the detectives go to that gun show. This is a neat trick, since gun shows are events, not venues. I went to the Wells, Minnesota 2008 show, on March 10th (on or about). It ran for two days, Saturday and Sunday. Monday, it was over and the high school in which it's been held every year for something like fifty years was back in service as a high school, holding classes. The 2008 show was OVER. I can't 'go back' to it, unless it's next March, but that'll be the 2009 show. Who knows what dealers will or won't be there. In any case, most of them have shops somewhere within a few hundred miles you'd to to visit them if you wanted to see them, anyway. This Philadelphia gun show was something else. The dealer in question wore an Uncle Sam costume! I've seen plenty of cowboy and Civil War reenactors (usually selling reenacting products, seldom firearms) in costume, but never Uncle Sam! The dancing girls must've showed up in the wrong place. They obviously got lost somewhere on the way to Las Vegas! If you go to any gun show, you'll see that roughly half the tables have an older woman seated behind them, and quite often they'll be members of a somewhat conservative, even reactionary, religious denomination. If you parade nearly naked women up on a stage during the show, you run a considerable risk of half of your vendors, who are paying table rent, becoming offended and not returning in the future. And, of course, it was overlooked that most gun shows are fall/winter/early spring events and at those times of the year, it's COLD in northern states. Even in a building full of people, it's too cold for thin young women to be strutting around with no real clothing on! I'll bet you a cow and two chickens the screenplay writers in this instance had never been to a gun show and have very rich imaginations about what it would be like to attend one.

I sure couldn’t take this episode of CSI: Miami for anything but a total farce, just like the other one(s) I mentioned earlier, or even the edition of Cold Case I just outlined. Were the writers that ignorant, or were they just hoping their audience was?

I’ve got a feeling the old ‘telle’ is going to sit dormant again for a long time to come…

Happier without television,

the TiGor