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.
Captain America: Civil War Commentary (Stephen McFeely, Joe Russo)
HE USED HIS FLESH HAND
WELL I FUCKING FEEL IT, ALRIGHT MCFEELY?!? ARE YOU HAPPY NOW?! I’m in a perpetual and incurable state of empathic suffering. Thanks a heap.
Maybe someone can explain this to me, because from where I’m standing, this is just sloppy writing.
We have Bucky, a.k.a. The Winter Soldier a.k.a. the “ghost story”, and yet he kills Tony’s parents in the least efficient way possible, lingers in front of a camera as if he’s posing for New York Fashion Week and then shoots the camera, like that even matters when his face is so clear to see? And which roadside security camera in records high quality images anyway, let alone one from 1992?
There’s a fan theory out there that Hydra forced him to do it this way, just to see if he could kill someone who used to be his friend, but if that’s true, they should have at least alluded to that instead of having us clean up the mess. Or is it because an admission like that would, one again, make Bucky sympathetic to the viewer?
I like the Russo’s and I’m sure they were hampered by the studio execs, but if they’d introduced an actual conflict, they wouldn’t have needed to force the issue like this.
Well, I mean. They are not wrong, that’s true. The thing is, we already knew all that? We have seen the Winter Soldier kill. We have seen him as the remorseless killing machine. And unlike it is for other bad boy characters, I honestly haven’t seen much of the typical white-washing. No one denies the Winter Soldier was a brutal killer. And the news that Tony’s parents were among his victims were of no surprise.
So it’s not that it was not necessary, because as they say it would take a very strong person to resist the impulse to kill the man they witnessed murder their parents. We needed to see it and it needed to be bad, because otherwise Tony’s reaction would not be justifiable.
Except… the movie opens not on the murder, but on a scene of torture. It opens on an explicit depiction of the murderer being (a) treated inhumanely, followed by (b) literal mind control. Then the murder. By the time we land in Siberia there is no doubt, whatsoever, that Bucky is not culpable. Not to mention that this scene literally takes place in the same place Bucky’s nightmare happened. And that’s kind of the problem with this sequence. We get that Tony has the right to his anger, and we get that he needs to lash out and make someone pay. But the longer the fight goes on, the less justifiable Tony’s anger becomes, until finally we arrive at a scene where Tony, in his titanium armor, kicks a crippled, lying-down man in the face (a man, at this time, poses no threat). And that’s somehow fine. We needed to see Bucky’s hands commit a murder to justify Tony’s rage, but we were also shown plenty of footage that makes it unjust, so that scale never balances itself. Not in this or the following movie.
Side note: I kinda like that the Winter Soldier strangles Maria with his flesh hand. I’m not fond of the “left arm is the murder arm” fanon. It’s his arm. It may not be flesh, but it’s his arm. The Winter Soldier is not in the arm, he’s in the head.
THIS is Bucky Barnes: tough exterior, still getting used to the world, beautiful man on the inside, highly confused, boyfriend material, still trying to figure himself out, smiley around Steve
THIS is James Buchanan Barnes: soft, likes science expos, Stark’s flying car was “eh” to him. The thing didn’t even stay off the ground, pre-war. Husband material, may or may not fall off a train. It really depends on when you turn the movie off, calls women “doll”,
THIS is The Winter Soldier: HYDRA’s play thing, murder bae, scary af, “Who the hell is Bucky?”, not dating material cause he’s and assassin, and also cause he’d forget the important dates. Probably hates old ladies. Probably going commando under those pants. Aka Bucknasty
THIS is Bucky: V handsome, Saved Sam from Spider-Man, war veteran, 100 years old, “What the hell hell is that?” , scared, straight outta cyro, has a ski jacket he obviously ripped the arm off of, also boyfriend material but he might forget some things, PTSD, needs everyone to be patient with him, will most likely let you play with his hair, #too old for this shit
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