Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Headscratchers/Season 6: Difference between revisions
Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Headscratchers/Season 6 (view source)
Revision as of 14:02, 16 June 2016
, 7 years ago→The Strawman Corps
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**** If they weren't very effective in using guns, it was because they weren't using the /right/ guns. Just because a pistol or SMG doesn't do much, doesn't mean a sniper rifle, combat rifle, or shotgun loaded with incendiary slugs won't work.
**** I tend to think of the "never useful" to also mean that 1) Guns attract attention. Stakings are quieter than gunshots and leave less evidence. 2) Guns cost money. Training costs money. Bullets cost money. Accidentally shooting a bystander or friend (Buffy isn't always fighting vamps in cemeteries, after all) - DEFINITELY going to cost money. Money the Scooby Gang really doesn't have, especially in the earlier seasons. Sure, guns might have their uses against vamps and demons, but they usually aren't practical uses as far as Buffy is concerned.
***** re: 'attracting attention' -- remember that in Sunnydale, not even rocket launchers or hand grenades attract attention. They had to ''blow up the entire high school'' to start attracting attention, and even then the police investigation was nonexistent. After all, in addition to the part where the entire graduating class knows exactly what happened, there is also the part where Buffy is on record as having burned down her ''last'' high school and having been given involuntarily psychiatric evaluation. She's the logical starting point for ''any'' investigation into 'So, why is there a smoking crater where we used to have a school?', and yet the social worker investigating Dawn's case in season 6 doesn't remotely act like Buffy was a person of interest in a major domestic terrorism incident less than three years ago.
***** If I remember correctly, the actual quote goes "These things? Never helpful'. I take it to mean that from Buffy's personal experiences, she doesn't see gun use as something beneficial to her, probably due to lack of proper defense against a gun if she loses it in confrontation.
****** While that almost certainly is Buffy's reasoning, it only underlines that her reaction is personal prejudice and not rationally thought through. There are no bulletproof policemen or soldiers IRL, and yet they are all still packing because they have legitimate need to. The 'defense' vs. being shot with your own weapon is ''learning how not to have your weapon taken away from you''. Buffy deserves a point for acknowledging that if she has no interest in training how to use firearms with appropriate skill she should not be carrying any, but is still missing a bet in that she is deliberately spurning an entire category of weapons training when she's in a full-time job that requires her to know how to potentially kill anything with anything.
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