In the film In the Line of Fire, John Malkovich plays an ex-CIA-operative-turned-psychopathic-assassin who manufactures a gun made out of polymer or some kind of plastic compound. He’s able to smuggle the disassembled gun into a fund-raising dinner for the president because the gun doesn’t set off the metal detectors. (The bullets he conceals inside a rabbit’s-foot key ring.) It’s a terrific movie, but I did wonder whether the Secret Service’s satisfaction in seeing a film in which they are portrayed heroically (in the person of Clint Eastwood) was offset by a horror of the training-film-for-assassins details featured. Is it in fact possible to make or buy a nonmetal gun similar to the one in the film that is capable of firing bullets with sufficient force to kill? –David English, Somerville, Massachusetts
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Been answering a lot of gun questions lately, haven’t I? But the topic does seem to have a certain continuing relevance. So far as is known (known to the federal Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms bureau, anyway), no gun made entirely of plastic is currently available. The closest thing is probably something like the Glock 17, an Austrian-made automatic pistol that has some plastic parts, including the grip and trigger guard. Training is required to recognize a disassembled Glock on an X-ray scanner. But it’s still 83 percent metal by weight.
