re: #464 Sheila Broflovski

#10. The Ultimate Anti-Sniper Strategy (Revolution)

The premise of the new J.J. Abrams/Eric Kripke drama Revolution is that all the electricity went out for some mysterious reason and we have gone back to lifestyles of the Civil War, complete with Civil War uniforms and, for some reason, muskets.

I don’t really know guns, but you know, they’re the kind you have to muzzle load like you are one of George Washington’s soldiers.

I don’t know why they use muskets, because I’m pretty sure the manufacturing process for a repeating rifle (you put in a bunch of rounds and take a bunch of shots in a row) doesn’t require electricity, since they’ve been making them since the mid-1800s or something. I mean, the machine gun was invented during the Civil War. You can make some pretty deadly guns without electricity. It’s not some ragtag bunch of outlaws, either — it’s the dominant military power in what’s left of the U.S. I don’t know, maybe they burned all the books about how to make things and raided a Civil War museum. Whatever.

The point is that the bad guys have muskets in this particular scene, and they run into a good guy sitting on a roof with a modern military sniper rifle.

Bad news for them! The commander quickly pulls all his troops under cover (well, apparently it takes him several hours, because it gets dark) and formulates a plan.

Quick, what kind of plan would you come up with to take out a sniper, an enemy who can quickly and accurately take out single targets? That’s right! Send one guy at a time! “Go go go!” he says.

The guy go go goes!

Blam! Thump. Oh, that didn’t work. What does he do now?

He thinks about it. “Send another man!” he says. His reasoning is that soon they will run out of bullets. I don’t know, how about maybe send 10 guys at him? Maybe the sniper shoots three of them and the other seven take the roof and cave the guy’s head in, because the sniper is all alone on the roof for some reason and all the good guys are inside talking about their feelings. Or I don’t know, keep sending lone guys, hoping that one of them is bulletproof.