Movie/film suggestions.

@thecarpathian 

 Want to know another reason to not like Florida? Know what’s the only paperwork required to buy a pistol from a private individual down there? Money. That’s it. No background check, no government paperwork, no registering it, nothing.

Fl is not the only state like that.  Tn as well, or at least I know it used to be.

 Even crazier? They just did away with requiring a concealed/carry permit. That’s right! No safety class to pass,

Again, this is not only in Fl.  In Vt no CCW is required. (But Vt does require a FFL for private handgun sales.)  In Pa no classes are required, but one does have to pass the same background check required to purchase a handgun.  That and $20 and you are good for five years.

Actually, a blank is a fully functioning cartridge without the bullet.

What most people refer to as ’bullets’-aren’t. That is just the little projectile that comes out of the gun. What goes into a gun is called a cartridge. It consists of 4 parts- the casing, the primer, the powder, and the projectile (bullet). A blank consists of 3 out of the four so it sounds and acts identically to a full cartridge without discharging a projectile.

@thecarpathian , this is what I was trying to describe to @gano a few hours ago when he and I were discussing negligent discharges on movie sets and war re-enactments/thanks to google:

https://thegunzone.com/how-to-modify-a-semi-auto-to-shoot-blanks/

"Dedicated Blank Firing Adapter (BFA): A BFA is crucial for reliable cycling. This device attaches to the muzzle of the firearm and constricts the gas pressure, providing the necessary backpressure for the bolt to cycle properly. BFAs are usually designed to be caliber specific and readily identifiable. Using the incorrect BFA can cause damage to the firearm or create a dangerous situation."

And evidently "backpressure" was an okay descriptor.  From what I read on the site where I just found this, there are a few other ways to modify a barrel or muzzle in order to fire blanks in a semi-automatic mode, but the one above was the one I was thinking about at the time.  But the thing is, with all of the methods, a live round (meaning one with a bullet attached to the neck of a cartridge) fired through a barrel modified as such, would absolutely have to result in a catastrophic barrel failure.  I think it would be pretty nasty.

@immatthewj , ah! Thank you for that information. It makes perfect sense and I stand corrected. Didn’t think of that, and I love learning something new!

Now the question: If the gun was modified to fire blanks, how did it manage to fire a live round without a problem??

Just thought of something, it was a revolver so that negates the need for any modification as the cylinder turns mechanically.

Yes, @thecarpathian , Baldwin had (what I believe was a single action type of) a revolver chambered in .45 Long Colt (which is not a round to be sneezed at, although not as powerful as a .44 magnum) and blanks and live rounds would have fired interchangeably out of that.  I am not at all familiar with the make that they stated that the revolver was.

Another example of what I was attempting to explain would be the rifles that the Honor Guards typically use at military funerals.  Not that I go to that many, the last one was my dad’s almost ten years ago to the day, but at my Dad’s, the Guard was using M1 Garands (which are semi-automatic) for the three-volley salute, and after each volley they had to manually re-cock their rifles prior to the next volley.  Meaning that their Garands had never been modified to fire blanks in a semi-auto mode, but had they been firing live rounds at my Dad’s funeral (almost surprised they were not, considering the nature of that town) they could have fired their volleys in a semi-auto mode without manually re-cocking.

Anyway, I am glad that the explanation I attempted worked for you, as I frequently struggle converting my mechanical understandings into words.  Just a couple of more "fun facts" if you are interested--on the subject of the .45 LC and the .44 mag, a .44 mag will drop right into the cylinder of a .45 LC (but not vice versa).  I only know this because I have tried it with mine, and it would PROBABLY discharge, but I would never try to actually fire a .44 mag out of a .45 LC because I am about 99.9% positive that the .45 LC frame would NEVER withstand the pressure.

And back to semiautomatic rifles and rifles that are not semiautos (such as a manually operated bolt action), given that explanation I attempted a few posts ago, if you were to take one of each with a barrel of identical length firing an identical load, the semiauto (the "gas gun") would have a somewhat lower muzzle velocity (although I do not know the actual specs) than the bolt action, because a percentage of the expanding gas (and I don’t know the actual percentage) is bled off to work the action of the semiautomatic.  Although with that typed, back maybe 13 or 14 years ago when I was spending a lot of time at the range, I would frequently run into this guy I liked who practically lived there.  One of his (many) guns was an AR10 chambered in .308, and the last time I talked to him he told me he had gone from being able to hit eggs at 600 yards with it to golf balls!  I guess I sounded a bit skeptical, because he said, "I never said that I was hitting them with EVERY shot, Matt."  But a gun that would do that is a pretty good shooting gun regardless of whether a "gas gun" or not.  And I suppose it is possible that maybe he was making those shots--after all, guns were his thing and maybe his only thing and he had an EXTREMELY nice scope and he worked up his own loads.

The last "fun fact" I’ll throw out is about the loads.  Understanding what I was attempting to explain about the expanding gas pushing the bullet down the barrel, for every given load there is an ideal barrel length.  As with a barrel that is shorter than ideal for a given load, the bullet will exit the muzzle while the gas behind it is still expanding and energy will be unused and wasted.  While with a barrel that is too long for a given load, the bullet will be still traveling down the barrel after the gas behind it has ceased expanding, and now the barrel is acting as a drag on the bullet.  So the barrel with a chambered cartridge is basically like a calibrated open-ended pipe bomb, and in the case of a semiauto, some of the energy is designed to be bled off to make the gun fire without being MANUALLY re-cocked between shots.