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| - The ineffective deployment of More Dakka. Bullets fly left, right and center, but no one is getting hit. Their remarkable ability to expend enormous amounts of ammunition without managing to hit anyone (important) distinguishes them as honor graduates from the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy. Related to this is when the goodies deliberately miss their shots because they do not wish to kill anyone. The real reason, of course, was the fact The A-Team was nominally a kid's show in prime time, and killing was a network no-no. At the time, it was overlooked due to the Rule of Cool.
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| abstract
| - The ineffective deployment of More Dakka. Bullets fly left, right and center, but no one is getting hit. Their remarkable ability to expend enormous amounts of ammunition without managing to hit anyone (important) distinguishes them as honor graduates from the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy. Related to this is when the goodies deliberately miss their shots because they do not wish to kill anyone. This trope is often Truth in Television, particularly after it was statistically analyzed in World War II. Officially this trope goes by the term spray and pray as any sustained automatic fire from a hand held weapon will require divine intervention to actually hit its target. The causes for this trope are rooted in physics because the recoil from each successive shot from an automatic weapon will force the weapon's muzzle to rise up until all of the rounds are passing harmlessly over the target. Since soldiers stopped lining up and charging the enemy head on, it has become much harder to actually hit your opponent, even with well-aimed shots. Targets that move quickly and stay behind cover are naturally harder to hit, and when they are returning fire one's own ability to concentrate, aim and shoot will be seriously impacted. Today small arms tactics revolve around suppressive fire and maneuver, which use aimed shots to suppress, or pin down the enemy, to allow other elements to move in close for the kill. Back in the late 1950s, in Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers he points out that military histories show that it takes several thousand rounds per person to kill an enemy soldier (in today's era of machine guns that shoot hundreds of rounds of suppressing fire, it takes at least 250,000 rounds to kill one militant in Iraq!), even under normal circumstances; in combat, accuracy with small arms goes way down. Way, way down. It should be noted that long before machineguns and semi-automatic rifles like the WWII M1 Garand were developed, artillery was the big killer on the battlefield and still is. Perhaps this trope is employed as an alternative to the opposite extreme of Guns Are Worthless and Annoying Arrows. A writer trying to be realistic about how dangerous both arrows and bullets are in the right hands would have to make the people firing them unable to hit the broad side of a barn in order to draw fights out for dramatic effect. The real reason, of course, was the fact The A-Team was nominally a kid's show in prime time, and killing was a network no-no. At the time, it was overlooked due to the Rule of Cool. The opposite of Improbable Aiming Skills. See also Bloodless Carnage, which often motivates this trope. Compare Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy, when this trope only seems to apply to the bad guys and the heroes' returning fire is picking off one Stormtrooper per shot. Examples of A-Team Firing include:
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