

The clerk does tell the cyborg he has to wait on the handguns, but he can take the long guns that day that’s before the killing machine shoots he clerk with the SPAS-12. They don’t really discuss the legality of the gun sales. We can imagine that the cyborg modified the semi-autos to fire in full-auto, and that should have been a carbine-length barrel in the story that he cut down later. It should have a 16-inch barrel to have been sold legally at the time. The clerk pulls down what looks to be a fairly stock Uzi, which is a problem. Can’t miss.” The Terminator also asks for an “Uzi 9mm” he sees on the gun rack. Just touch the trigger, the beam comes on, and you put the red dot where you want the bullet to go. Though laser sights weren’t commercially available at the time, making this gun super anachronistic, the film actually used a real laser sight, albeit a primitive one, made by a designer from the company that would become SureFire. 45 Longslide pistol with what looks like a small silver Maglite mounted to the top via a bracket and a scope ring. When the cyborg asks for a “.45 longslide with laser sighting,” he’s presented with the gun that ended up on the movie poster. The Alamo Sport Shop has awesome, big glossy logos of the era for Winchester, Ruger and Colt on the front, lending authenticity. I suspect they filmed this scene in an actual gun shop, and a ludicrously well-stocked gun shop at that the inventory felt more like that of a Hollywood prop master’s. We’ve spoken about the guns of The Terminator before on this site. Naturally, he has to get some guns, so he heads to a gun shop. His mission is to kill the mother of the man who becomes the leader of the human resistance in the future. In his break-through role, a young Arnold Schwarzenegger plays an evil cyborg sent back in time to 1984 from a dystopian future where people and the machines they created are at war. This is one of the most legendary gun shop scenes of all time.

Realistic or not, these epic scenes are worth rating. Here’s a rundown of some flicks that got it right, and some that got it very wrong. The depictions of buying a gun in film and on TV is often goofier than depictions of gun use.
WATCH: Ballistic’s 10 Favorite Movie Shootouts of All-Time Gun Store Scenes in the Movies
