WRITER’S INTRO TO GUNS PART 2, SWAT, AND MISSING PERSONS - 041

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This week on the Writer's Detective Bureau, Writer's Introduction to Guns, part two, SWAT and missing persons. I'm Adam Richardson, and this is the Writer's Detective Bureau. Welcome to episode number 41 of the Writer's Detective Bureau, the podcast dedicated to helping authors and screenwriters write professional quality crime-related fiction. I'd like to thank gold shield patron Debra Dunbar from debradunbar.com, and gold shield patron C.C. Jameson from ccjameson.com, and my newest coffee club patron, author TL Dyer, and all of my loyal coffee club patrons for supporting me month after month. Find links to their author websites in the show notes at writersdetective.com/41. If you have your own author business, considering joining Patreon. It's free for you, and it allows your readers to support your financially through monthly micro payments. Give your fans a chance to show their support by creating your own Patreon account right now. To learn more, visit writersdetective.com/Patreon, P-A-T-R-E-O-N.

And real quick, I wanted to mention that I just launched a secret invite-only Facebook group for my gold shield patrons to get exclusive live streams twice a month, geared towards getting your stories unstuck. So, a little more help than just answering the police work basics. If this interests you, check out my gold shield tier on Patreon, but do not worry. I am not going all subscription model on you. I'm here to provide as much free help as I can through this podcast and the main Writer's Detective Q&A Facebook group, and then, again, through my APB mailing list, which I send out on the last day of each month.

Last week, on episode 40, I talked about the nomenclature of cartridges, and how a bullet is only part of a cartridge or a round, the most common types of modern handguns, and how rifling inside a gun barrel can create striations on a bullet for forensic comparison. This week we'll start with part two of the Writer's Introduction to Guns, and before I go any further, I want to menton an invaluable resource. It's the reference book Writer's Guide to Weapons: A Practical Reference for Using Firearms and Knives in Fiction, written by my friend Ben Sobieck. Ben's book is one my two go-to reference books for weapons.

Ben's also the creator of Writer's Block Coffee, which I absolutely love, and also the inventor of The Writer's Glove, for those of you trying to type in a winter or very cold environment. So, if you're interested in Writer's Block Coffee or The Writer's Glove, I will also have links to those in the show notes, which you can find at writersdetective.com/41. I'll also include links to a two-part guest blog I did a couple years ago for Ben's website at crimefictionbook.com, which covered the best handguns for detectives in fiction, and the best handguns for criminal characters.

If you're wondering what my other go-to reference book for weapons is, it's Jane's Guns Recognition Guide. Jane's does all sorts of recognition guides for military aircraft, warships, tank and combat vehicles, spacecrafts, civilian aircraft, airlines, submarines of the world, special forces, trains. You name it, there is a Jane's guide. If children's picture book author and illustrator Richard Scarry and author Tom Clancy had ever collaborated on a book, it would have been a Jane's recognition guide. So, I will include links to the Jane's guides as well in the show notes.

What I want to talk about this week is the difference between a rifle and a shotgun, a machine gun and a submachine gun, but first, let's talk real quick about caliber when we're talking about ammunition. .44 magnum, .357 magnum, .38 special, .38 +P, 9mm, .357 Sig, .45 ACP, .40 caliber S&W, or Smith & Wesson, 10mm, .22, .380 Auto. There's so many different types of ammunition. Let's get the magnum stuff out of the way first, and Ben actually did a great job explaining this on his blog, which I'll also link to in the show notes. But real quick, magnum generally means that the round or cartridge that we're talking about carries more of a velocity punch, and by that I mean there's more propellant or powder in the cartridge, and the cartridge itself is usually a little bit longer, making each round a hotter load than the standard round of the same caliber.

Similarly, if we're talking about a .38, where it's a +P round. That is a designation for an overpressure or high pressure load. So, these magnum and +P designations are important to take note of as a shooter, because they produce higher pressure throughout the weapon when fired and can become really dangerous to the shooter if loaded in a firearm that isn't designed for high pressure ammunition. Just because a round fits into the gun doesn't mean it should be used in the gun. For example, a .38 Special round can be fired from a .357 handgun with no problem. But a .357 magnum round cannot safely be fired from a .38 handgun, which brings us to the concept of caliber.

Caliber refers to the diameter of the bullet, or the approximate inner diameter of the gun barrel, usually written in hundredths or thousandths of an inch. So, a .45 caliber round means the bullet is .45 inches in diameter. So, a .50 caliber is literally half an inch in diameter, .5 inches. But then, of course, there's the metric system. A 9mm round has a 9mm bullet diameter, which would technically, if we were talking in the imperial system, be a .355 caliber, but nobody calls it that. It's a 9mm round, or a 9mm handgun. The key thing to remember about the numbers used to denote calibers is that even if something seems mathematically equivalent, like a .223 caliber rifle round, it's the same bullet diameter as a 5.56 NATO rifle round, because .223 inches equals 5.56 millimeters, but they are different rounds with different pressure ratings and even some size differences in other parts of the cartridge, just like that .38 caliber and that .357 magnum.

So, now looking at a round or a cartridge, you can tell the difference between a handgun round and a rifle. When you look at these rounds, you'll notice that the handgun rounds tend to be shorter and fatter. The bullets have larger diameters, usually, but the casing itself is relatively short in comparison with a rifle round. Rifle rounds usually have a small, pointed, copper bullet at the top that are sitting on top of a longer, thinner casing. There is a much higher ratio of propellant to bullet in a rifle round. This is one of the reasons why a rifle round goes so much further than a handgun round.

Last week we talked about rifling being those lands and grooves that spiral down the inside of the barrel, kind of like that 007 image that we talked about that causes the bullet to spiral as it heads down range. I also mentioned that the longer the barrel, the more accurate the shot. Rifles have very long barrels in comparison to a handgun, making a rifle far more accurate, especially at long distances. One of the most common rifles carried by law enforcement officers is the AR-15, or M4. Real quick, AR stands for ArmaLite Rifle, not assault rifle. The ArmaLite Company designed the AR-15 in 1956, and then licensed production to Colt. But the AR-15 is a semiautomatic rifle, which, as we talked about last week, means that you need to release the trigger after each round is fired in order for the next round to fire.

One other vocab word you should be aware of is carbine, or carbine, which is, essentially, a rifle with a slightly shorter barrel than normal. Now, the military, on the other hand, has the M4A1, which is the modern successor to the M16, and at first glance, looks very similar to an AR-15. The M4A1, however, is a fully automatic rifle. Other terms for a fully automatic rifle are full auto and machine gun. These fully automatic rifles require the shooter to pull the trigger once, and hold it down for continuous fire. So, none of this letting go of the trigger to fire the next round. You pull the trigger once, hold it down, and it keeps firing.

In addition to the M4A1 style of full auto rifles, another common type of machine gun is one that is belt-fed. These include the M60 and the M249 SAW, S-A-W, which stands for squad automatic weapon, where, rather than a magazine that is inserted and ejected from the weapon, ammunition is fed into the weapon on a continuous belt. These are the kinds of weapons that the military uses to lay down covering fire, long, continuous fire. Again, if you've seen a Schwarzenegger movie from the 80s or 90s, you undoubtedly saw him holding one of these belt-fed machine guns in one of his big, huge, flexed arms. So, if a machine gun is fully auto and the AR-15s that cops carry are semiautomatic rifles, what the heck is a submachine gun? Submachine guns have been around since the invention of the Tommy guns of the American gangster Prohibition era.

Brigadier General John T. Thompson developed the Thompson submachine gun in 1918. Simply put, submachine guns are magazine-fed carbines that fire handgun cartridges. So, the Tommy gun was a carbine chambered for a .45 caliber handgun round. Submachine guns of the recent past include the HK MP5, the Ingram MAC-10, and the Uzi. Submachine guns are still favored by SWAT teams for doing certain tasks like building entries or other close quarters combat situations. Some still carry the HK MP5, but other teams have updated their weapons to the HK UMP45, the Sig Sauer MPX, or the FN P90. If you want to see what these look like, talk to your nearest teenager that's playing Call of Duty, and I'm sure they would be more than happy to show you images of what those guns look like.

All right, finally, let's talk about shotguns. Shotguns have long barrels like a rifle, but there's no rifling inside a shotgun barrel. It has a smooth bore, and while handguns and rifles are classified in size by caliber, most shotguns are classified in size by gauge. Shotguns are used most commonly for bird hunting and trapper skeet target shooting, where they fire buckshot. So, unlike a rifle or handgun cartridge that has a bullet at the top, the shotgun fires a large number of ball bearings out of a single shotgun shell. The shotgun shell is usually red or green plastic with a brass bass to it.

For law enforcement use, though, we normally carry 12 gauge double-aught buck, or double-aught buckshot. Double-aught means two zeroes, so one 12 gauge double-aught buckshot gun shell contains nine 33 caliber pellets. Now, we also carry 12 gauge slugs, and a slug is a one-ounce piece of solid lead inside of a 12 gauge shotgun shell. So, shooting buckshot that puts nine pellets down range at once through an un-rifled barrel means you're going to cover a larger area with projectiles, but not as accurately as you would with a rifle, especially the further away your target is, because those projectile patterns are going to start separating or increasing the further away you are from the gun.

It's why shotguns have the nickname scattergun. Now, it is a great tool if I'm covering a car full of armed felons on a high risk traffic stop, but I'd much rather have a rifle in my hand if I'm dealing with a hostage situation. So, to learn more about which weapons you should equip your characters with, check out the link to the guest post I mentioned earlier, which I've linked to in the show notes at writersdetective.com/41. Or, if you have questions about the stuff we just covered, by all means, send them to me here at writersdetective.com/podcast.

I know that was a lot of talk about guns, so I want to segway into a related topic, but offer some non-gun insight into SWAT teams. Now, SWAT stands for special weapons and tactics. Modern SWAT teams may be called something else entirely, like ERT, for emergency response team, or SEB, special enforcement bureau, or ESU, emergency services unit. Whatever the name, the idea is the same. Some of the more dangerous calls we go on require more tools and tactics than the average officer has immediately available. Sure, SWAT teams have those close quarter submachine guns we just talked about, and sniper rifles, but that's really just the beginning of the special weapons they bring to the table.

Where SWAT really excels, unbeknownst to what the media will have you believe, is at deescalation. SWAT has tear gas, distractionary devices which we call flash bangs, 40mm foam impact rounds, 12 gauge bean bag rounds. They essentially have an entire truck full of less lethal weapons that they can use to get someone who is high risk to surrender without it becoming an officer-involved shooting. There's one majorly important safety tool that SWAT teams across the country have been able to acquire in the last few years especially, but it's a tool that is grossly misunderstood in its application.

Now, this is one example where the tactics part of the SWAT name really comes into play, and I'm talking about the armored vehicle. Whether it's an MRAP that was acquired from the military for free, or a $100,000 Lenco Bear, or BearCat, access to these armored vehicles, I think, is a must-have for your community. The media will have you believe that these vehicles were acquired to move around jackbooted thugs hellbent on squashing your civil rights, and that it's a militarization of the police force.

But we aren't talking about a tank with a big old cannon on the front, we're talking about taking the same kind of vehicle that collects money bags from the safe at your local grocery store, and as a side note, it's my personal opinion that a police force is militarized when it starts to ignore the Constitution, and not when they're wearing cotton cargo pants instead of crease polyester. A police force better be able to carry the same weapons that its citizens do, but I digress. That's a tangent for another day.

Back to the armor. The biggest advantage of having these armored vehicles is using them as a ballistic backstop. I worked one case where our homicide suspect who had already been involved in a gunfight with the police the night before, was holed up on the ground floor of a local motel that was backed up to a major freeway. The only thing between his motel room and the freeway was the motel's rear parking lot right outside his window. So, SWAT put their armored truck right up on the grass outside of his window so if he started shooting or, heaven forbid, if the SWAT ended up having to engage him from the doorway, none of the bullets would make it to the freeway or to the surrounding neighborhood.

Fortunately for us, the homicide suspect surrendered after I ended up playing negotiator for the better part of an hour over 15 different phone calls into the room. But anyway, the point here, though, is that these armored vehicles act like a backstop for a pitcher in baseball. If a domestic violence call turns into a standoff with an armed, barricaded subject, wouldn't it be nice to have a big old, bulletproof truck to park on the lawn to reduce the likelihood a stray bullet will reach across the street to that school or park? Those are the kinds of plans that go into a SWAT briefing and how your SWAT operator characters will think about these scenarios. So, when your heroes are closing in on your antagonist, what kind of take down tactics is your protagonist going to use? What kind of special weapons and tactics are at their disposal?

Daniel Aegan, author of Blood Drive, who you can find on Amazon, and I'll include a link to his page in the show notes, sent me this question via Twitter. Do you really have to wait 48 hours to file a police report for a missing person, an adult? Can you do so if you're dating and not technically living together? My tweet in response was that's a story trope for getting a protagonist to sleuth on their own. Anyone can file a missing person report, and no time delay is required. Check out the manual cops in California use, and I included a link. So, to expand on my reply tweet to Daniel, anyone can report a missing person, and there is not a requirement for the person to be missing 24 or 48 hours like Hollywood will have you believe.

In fact, if it's an at-risk subject, like small children, dependent adults, or even adults that have a medical issue where they don't have their medication, these folks must be added to the missing persons database within four hours of the police department becoming notified of the missing person. Now, that said, adults voluntarily go missing all the time. If it's someone you've recently started dating, I think the term is called ghosting. But all kidding aside, we do take missing persons cases seriously, and a detective will be assigned to the case if they haven't been found within the first day.

If the missing person is an adult, and once located it turns out that they are totally fine and voluntarily decided to move away, or in contact with their family, friends, coworkers, partner, or whatever, that is totally legal. We will let the reporting party know that the missing person is no longer missing, but if that missing person doesn't want any contact, then we don't provide any kind of details to the reporting party as to the location or any contact information for that person once we found them.

The link I provided in the reply tweet to Daniel is the California Peace Officer's Standards and Training manual for investigating missing person's cases, and I will include this as well in the show notes at writersdetective.com/41. But if you're on my monthly APB email, where I send out curated links for crime fiction writers, then this will probably look familiar because I put it in there recently. But if links to research resources like this sound like something you're into and you're not on my mailing list, you can join by going to writersdetective.com/mailinglist to sign up.

When you do, immediately check your inbox or spam folder for a confirmation email from me. Just click confirm on that confirmation email, and you'll immediately get the January and February 2019 APB emails to get you started down the research rabbit hole. That's it for this week. Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Writer's Detective Bureau podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to hit the subscribe button. Send me your questions by going to writersdetective.com/podcast. Thanks again for listening. Have a great week, and write well.

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Writer's Detective Bureau

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