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We talk about gun movies a lot on this blog, so let me tell you about a website I stumbled across recently: the Internet Movie Firearms Database. It is, simply, Wikipedia for guns in the movies. Pick a title, and you’ll find a listing of every last gun used in that movie, along with stills, a little about each gun, nitpicking of errors, and so on. Or, you can look up a gun, and find out what movies it was in. Following the Wikipedia model, the imfdb is cooperatively written and edited, so if you don’t find what you’re looking for, you can write it yourself. If you find an error, you can edit it.

Here, just to give you an idea, is the listing for “Saving Private Ryan:”

Surfing the site, which runs from “A Beautiful Mind” to “Zulu Dawn” I have learned that:
the Cobra Assault Cannons in “Robocop” – my favorite dystopian-future movie – are dressed-up .50 BMGs.

“The Unit” must hold the all-time TV (imfdb has entries for TV, too) record for variety of guns on screen. Mostly, they get the guns right, although in one scene featuring clay target shooting at a Rich Guy’s house, they use a cheap, clunky, Turkish Stevens 512 O/U, suggesting that being a Rich Guy isn’t what it used to be.

“The Bridge at Remagen,” which I saw in the theater when I was young, is an under-rated gun movie. It gets major bonus points for using several real M-24 Chafee tanks of the type that actually crossed the bridge.

And so on, and on, and on . . .like the Internet itself, the site seems endless, and like the Internet, it is simultaneously an awe-inspiring repository of human knowledge and a monumental waste of time.

Enjoy.