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A friend posted this on another forum, hadn't seen it here. They did things differently back then...

[youtube]http://youtube.com/watch?v=jDP8BRSEjrA[/youtube]

If you look, there is more than one cop using a cross-draw holster.

Yup. Different.

Range Fee = .25 cents
No hearing protection
No eye protection
Multiple shooters advancing together

Mining lead with bare hands.

Not in this video, but someone along the way had to have gotten shot while standing at the target there with a cigar in their mouth or the ear plugs in their ears. You know it had to have happened.

Even in the video, one shot missed the guy's earlobe by a sixteenth of an inch! One guy with the cigarette in his mouth was darn near hit in the lips.

Overall, pretty fascinating. I enjoyed the look at 1938 reloading machines and practices as well.

Jumping Frog wrote:Even in the video, one shot missed the guy's earlobe by a sixteenth of an inch! One guy with the cigarette in his mouth was darn near hit in the lips.

I think that those were not cigarettes but pieces of chalk. No matter where they're hit, they're liable to shatter to the bottom. Also, as far as we know, the shooter was just out of camera range with a revolver on a rest and a 40MOA error would have been required to hurt anybody.

At least, I hope they took those minimal precautions.

I think it's likely they did. Did you notice all the jump cuts during the Thompson demo? The last initial was shot twice, per the film, but only one set of bullet holes appeared on the target paper. They were using a fairly large number of (by today's standards, quite crude) camera tricks throughout the film.

The thing that impressed me most was the combat stage where the shooter had to pull the revolver from a drawer before firing. There are matches today where that stage would not look out of place.

Given that it comes from 1938, in LA County, the home of Hollywood, my guess is that the scenes where the "shooter" is off camera were created with trick photography. If not, it clearly shows that people weren't necessarily smarter in the first half of the last century than they are now. I also wonder if another possibility is that they were using plastic bullets in those scenes? When I was a kid I used to shoot primer powered plastic 38 special rounds inside the house at a steel backstop/trap. They were powerful enough to do what is depicted but not powerful enough than to do much more than maybe give the target holder a bad bruise and bloody lip. They could put an eye out, and were still dangerous, but wouldn't kill you.

This was their exibition shooting team, not just regular officers. I would imagine there was no tricks involved, other that trick shots. I saw the one shot awfully close to the ear of hte one officer that had the cigarettes in his ears.