And like I said, I disagree because the Marines I've come across are mostly young. One I've known since high school. Yeah when they are back in the civilian world, they act pretty tame for the most part but when they are among other Marines, they get really loud and proud about being in the corp. Tanner is the old Marine in the group, but the other 2 aren't that old, especially the Asian guy so there's no way all 3 of them are Gulf War vets. Tanner only confirmed himself as retired.

It's certainly not required though. For years, shooter games were fine with phony names (I loved the RC-P90), and even Black Ops 2 gone back to making stuff up (PDW-57, B23R), and I don't think sales have suffered.

LeBron James and Tiger Woods don't pay Nike to wear Nike gear, it's the other way around, and you can argue the same should apply to CoD and Battlefield.

The fact that game developers do pay a fee to gun companies for using the real names and logos on the guns in the game. But if you want to compare LeBron and Tiger to something, it's ISPC guys and gals like Jessie Abbate who do exactly the same thing as sports players, go around advertising products of companies when they compete and are most likely sponsored by said companies.

You don't compare a living person advertising an industry to a game. You compare say a sports game like Madden and the money they spend to get the images of real life players in their game and the same can apply to shooter games like Call of Duty and Battlefield. The vast majority of games don't use the names of the guns. Just using the image of the gun and making up a phony name is alright.

Whether or not shooter games can be used as a training tool on how to use a game is debatable. There might be a couple of games that would explain the intricacies of a gun but most are point and shoot. They don't explain to the play what the bolt release does, why you need to rack the slide to chamber a round or how to load magazines or even what kind of ammo is used somethings and of course mixing clip and mag. In Black Ops 2, they have one perk be double mags and another perk called extended clip.

It's no so far fetch that shooter games are supporting the gun industry not just by money directly from copy rights on logos and names of guns but a new generation of gun owners that have been brought up playing call of duty. I've talked to some of my Marine buddies about how they had to deal with the Call of Duty generation that have been enlisting.

I once read on a gun blog somewhere that Call of Duty was directly responsible for Gun Culture 2.0, which I think is a good thing.

You said it, CoD and Battlefield introduces these products to an entire generation of impressionable consumers. Companies pay for product placement and ads in games like Rainbow Six: Vegas 2, why should it be any different with guns? Why should Activision, and by extension, we the consumers, have to pay for the privilege of seeing the Remington script plastered on a few guns? Jeep pays for their product to be in CoD, why not Remington?

I'm curious though, if someone were to create a new FPS and wanted to use real names but didn't want to pay any licensing fees, how many guns could they get away with? A lot of patents have expired, and I don't think you have to license a government issued name (like M16 or M60).

You could also get away with just the military designations too, I think, especially with stuff like M-4A1 or M-1911A1 and not list manufactures.

Also, I don't the AK-47 was ever patented or anything, being a product of a worker's paradise.

Further thought, since the gun designs themselves are patented and what not, you couldn't name the gun, but I think that you could use thier military designations.

M-1919, M-2, M-1918, M-1897, M-14, ad nausem.

Now the mall ninjas are gonna be out of luck when the latest super duper piston driven automated death ray isn't assigned an M- number, but, oh well.

I'm shocked Infinity Ward got away with calling EOTechs just holographic sights for as long as they did. Does anyone else make holographic sights?

All the folks that do just seem to rip off EOTech.

Gander Mountain's actually made a big change (at least the big local store we have in Lake Mary) to trying to advertise the latest and greatest. I went in there to ask about Mosins and the clerk said that surplus rifles and AKs barely even get accepted by them at this point regardless of condition. The used racks are lined with AR variants and quality bolt and lever-action rifles and various shotguns, and for months the only two surplus rifles I saw on any of them were an M1 Carbine and an Arisaka Type 38 (chrysanthemum intact, in fact). Meanwhile, the entire center section of the back wall has all of the newest or most high-tech stuff: FS2000, Taurus Circuit Judge, SCAR-L, AR-50, PS90, etc.

i remeber the 08 election panic and a year later how all the people who couldnt actually afford those rifles sold them off, kittery trading post has this thing where "hunting" guns are on the floor and "tactical" guns behind the counter. Behind the counter they ran out of shelf space so ar15s were laying on the floor from the amount of people off loading them. Cant wait till it happens aain and i can get a cheap ebr lol