Watching a dumb action movie on the plane and it got me wondering: when assassins in movies assemble their rifle from a briefcase or whatever, how do they know it’s zeroed right?

— Misha. Angel Investor, Photographer, Shitposter (@drethelin) December 9, 2021

You zero it elsewhere. Re-assembling it doesn’t change that much. Anyway, most of the shots assassins in movies make are so close in that I could make them without optics, just iron sights. Zeroing doesn’t matter much when your target is 50M away, as is often the case in movies.

For instance, I fired a non-zeroed M-16A2 at 300M targets in the army and hit 9 out of 10 times. That was with a rifle I just randomly picked up. People who can shoot well can do things to regular people that seem impossible. At 75M, I could’ve fired that puppy from the hip and hit most of the targets.