Can a human actually fire a handheld Minigun the way they do in movies and videogames?

 The answer here is a really big, no.

It was tried once by US Army Special Forces and the results were practically catastrophic. Even in the movies you’ve seen it done in, there’s a lot more happening off-screen to make it look real than you could imagine.

(Old Painless, a heavily modified GE M134 Minigun used in the movies Predator and T2: Terminator 2: Judgment Day)

The one everyone knows was designed around Jesse Ventura’s personal preferences for the movie Predator (it helps that he was actually an armorer when he served on a US Navy Underwater Demolition Team during the Vietnam era - UDT was a part of Naval Special Warfare and was a close relative of the SEAL Teams). It has an M60 handguard to hold onto, and is fitted with a harness, so that he could carry it for the movie. Arnold later used the same gun for T2, with slightly different modifications.

What you don’t see on screen is that neither of them are carrying the batteries for it, (Miniguns are electrically operated) because they were simply too heavy for either Ventura or Arnold. The wire leading to the batteries were hidden down their pants’ legs. It also has a supply of ammunition that can be exhausted in seconds (a Minigun fires up to 6000rpm, and a human just can’t carry enough of the 7.62x51mm ammunition it fires to make it useful). Even significantly reducing its ammunition consumption (you can slow it down) to about 1250rpm, the one they used fired its total ammunition supply in seconds. Even at that sedate rate, the ammunition canister for it held only 550 rounds which it could exhaust in 26.4 seconds. And carrying 550 rounds on top of the batteries and gun would be back-breaking work. Neither Ventura, nor Arnold after him, both extremely strong body builders, could even do it. And remember, that’s only 26.4 seconds worth of ammo, at only 21% of the gun’s actual potential rate of fire.

Next, they used blanks in those movies, for obvious reasons. But if they hadn’t, the recoil force is so extreme it can’t be controlled. Blanks don’t produce recoil the way live rounds do. The one time US Army Special Forces tried this, the gunner was literally spun halfway around by the force of the recoil. The only reason he didn’t kill anyone behind him was, fortunately, the gun had consumed all of its ammunition by the time that 180 degree spin was complete.

(You can’t carry this bad boy with enough ammo to make it useful and couldn’t control it even if you were able to carry enough ammo.)

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