“If you’re not a comic book fan, when you think ‘Captain America’, you probably think ‘jingoist’, a propaganda piece. But if you know the comics, every time something happens in the world, he gets to address it: the hippies, the civil rights movement, the Watergate. And our MCU Cap missed all that, he missed 9/11. So he gets to address where we are now without having seen what forced us to make these decisions. He did not have the same slow descent into the cynicism that we all had over the last 40 years. He comes out with fresh eyes.
One of the great things in the comics that we hoped to replicate in the movie is that his reaction is never the sort of knee-jerk old man conservative reaction you would think the man dressed in an American flag would have. He exemplifies the spirit of America, not a party, not a government. He’s never going to fall on a political line. He stands for an ideal and he stands for principles that are translatable across the board. What he is against in this film is subversion, subterfuge and lies, that line between freedom and fear.”
After @thorofficial, here is my new triptych – entitled “Sentinel of Liberty” – dedicated to the #Marvel#CaptainAmerica films trilogy. I mainly based this work on the characters so I hope you will enjoy it as much as the last one. #Avengers
writers of avengers fic consistently misunderstand this phrase, and honestly i don’t blame them, it’s pretty confusing in context. bucky barnes is a sniper. snipers use rifles. fury was shot outta nowhere, by a sniper, presumably with a rifle. and if you’re not a humongous gun nut, you probably don’t automatically think slug == shotgun, not rifle. nor will you know that ‘rifling’ can mean two different things.
lucky for you, i am a humongous gun nut, so i’m here to sort that out for you!
okay, for starters, shotgun barrels are, in fact, rifled. and we all know you trace a bullet by the marks the barrel’s rifling leaves on it. so how could the winter soldier’s leavings make the ballistics techs at SHIELD shrug helplessly? well, because it wasn’t a bullet, it was a slug. a shotgun slug. and in shotgun slugs, ‘rifling’ doesn’t mean the grooves in the barrel, it means the fin-like protrusions on the slug itself, like so:
that’s an american-made big game slug, and it’s got those fins to keep it twisting despite the drag of the cork back end, which acts to stabilize it with air resistance. short range, but plenty effective if you’re hunting moose.
but the winter soldier was hunting bigger game: nick fury. through a brick wall. which is why he used something more like this:
stainless steel saboted slugs. as you can see, they have no rifling – that is, no twisty fins. they rely on their forward-weighted mass for their accuracy, which is tolerably good up to about 100 meters.
there are a number of russian makers of these, going back to soviet days, but you can also easily machine your own. these don’t deform on impact, meaning they wouldn’t have great stopping power against, say, a charging polar bear – but also meaning they keep their trajectory when going through obstructions like the wall of steve’s apartment. and that plastic sabot, or boot, which makes it fit tight and grip in the barrel, flies off when fired, taking with it any identifying marks from the barrel rifling.
i don’t think we ever got to see what bucky fired these from, but it would probably have been something like this:
a russian vepr 12 shotgun, which looks a whole lot more like a rifle than a shotgun at first glance. tactical shotguns like these are popular with law enforcement for the same reason bucky used one to shoot fury – urban combat. right through the dang wall.
so there you have it. ‘russian slug, no rifling’ means bucky came loaded for bear.
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