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An American thing? Do people in other countries drive and hold the shotgun too?
In Australia: yes and it’s commonplace. But like 70% of our media is American so unsurprising.
That’s like an amazing American showerthought, I never even considered it
Shotgun is an America thing, coming from the stagecoach era. The shotgun in question has a shortened barrel for reduced storage footprint.
The BMW R12 has a sidecar mounted with an MG 42 light machine gun. But no-one calls sidecar gunner
That is purely an American thing.
Not saying my family had someone in the passenger seat with a shotgun to protect their batch of white lightning…also not saying they did.
Nope. Canada had stagecoach and shotguns too. So did Mexico. The Sundance Kid owned a bar in Calgary at one point, and worked out at the Bar U ranch near Calgary before that.
n’t.
It’s still relevant. I always hand my passengers a pistol before disembarking.
Years ago I read “shotgun wedding” and thought it was common to see a guy having to marry a girl he fucked while her father was there at the side with a rifle.
Capaz son asi andá a saber…
It means “quick marriage because the bride is pregnant” and that is 100% the origin of the phrase.
Particularly in poorer, rural parts of the USA having a child out of wedlock was incredibly shameful, and the financial burden of a single motherhood was intolerable. So the bride’s family would ensure the man responsible married their daughter … regardless of how he felt about it. Sometimes that meant having a shotgun at the wedding to ensure he didn’t run off.
NL here. “Shotgun” is a concept, though mostly through Pop Culture Osmosis.
hi northernlion i love your videos
Not many countries had to arm the person next to the coach driver to fight off natives defending their country against foreign invaders.
lets not pretend that the US sprouted up out of nothing from nowhere and decide on a whim to slaughter native people. the American continent exists as it does today because of European colonial projects, and the brutal treatment of natives was official policy of the pope
No, no, no, this is all wrong. When we discuss immigration and the current situation in the US all Americans are European immigrants.
When we talk about the genocide of the natives Americans, it was done by Americans, Europeans had nothing to do with it.
;-)
Technically 85% correct now, after brexit ;p
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No, but many needed to protect those passengers from bandits and other assorted outlaws.
Fun fact: Joseph Stalin first became known to Lenin when he organized the successful robbery of a bank stagecoach in Russia. The stagecoaches were heavily protected by armed men riding on the outside of the coach as well as riding horses alongside, but Stalin observed that they tended to relax their guard upon reaching a densely-populated city, on the assumption that revolutionaries would not be willing to injure or kill innocent bystanders.
This assumption was very wrong in Stalin’s case. He had his people lob satchel bombs at the coach and riders after they reached the city, killing most of the guards as well as nearly 100 innocent bystanders in the vicinity. They made off with a huge amount of money, and Lenin congratulated Stalin although he had only planned the operation and not participated in it. The importance of delegation!
Bonus fun fact: part of the reason for their success might be that one of the local police informants was … Stalin.
I’m starting to think this Stalin guy has some red flags.
Huh, who knew that violent bank robbers who indiscriminately kill bystanders would
do a bunch of genocide after their violent takeover complete with secret police and gulagsI mean create the best goverbmont in history, praise USSR or something.
I’m the times coaches like that became common it wasn’t really safe to travel in most parts of the world.
Weren’t these coaches a thing in the 19th century US, from which time the term comes? From what i could find quickly, Highway robbery became less of a thing in the UK and mainland Europe by the end of the 18th century.
There was once a theory that the reason for the difference in which side a vehicle is driving on the road today, stems from whether a country had many stretches of untamed wilderness with lots of bandits. So if there was a high likelihood that whoever you met on the road was a danger, the horsecart driver preferred passing them on the side of their sword arm (right hand as default), while if you did not have to take that into account, you would pass them on the left hand side.
The theory has now largely been abandonded as spurious, but it does remain a fact that there were dangerous stretches of roads in older times in Europe as well.
That’s not what it was for. They fired a shotgun before turning onto a road. If two wagons came head to head on a crappy old western road it could cause hours of delay because the horses would have to be hitched to the back of one of the wagons a pull it all the way back to the crossroad.
What an interesting creative writing exercise
Now I’d like to know why in France it’s la place du Mort, the seat of the dead…
Because they didn’t have a shotgun.
While this is probably some bullshit from the horse drawn carriage era, what I’d like to say is that statistically speaking riding shotgun is the most dangerous seat in car crashes, so the saying still works
Isn’t that because a driver will instinctively pull left (instinct to protect their own body) when facing a head on collision in many cases? Also the rate of being thrown from the vehicle, being pierced by objects from outside the vehicle, and the risk of unsecured things (including passengers not belted in - wear your goddamn seatbelt!) flying forward from the back all being higher?
Not sure how the saying still works if those types of things are the main causes for passengers riding shotgun being statistically higher to get fatally injured
The shotgun Georg, who uses a small motorbike to jump inside 80,000 cars on highway and bites whoever is in the shotgun seat anually; is an outlier and their victims should be excluded from this survey.
La place du mort, c’est pas le siège du milieu a l’arrière ?
Ben j’ai toujours pensé que c’est la place du passager.
Ça dépend peut-être de la région.
My kids say “Chewbacca!”
thats a stagecoach thing, right?
Yeah it was bench seating so one guy had the reins and the other had a shotgun. Hence the name.
its interesting the slang that persists…
“i call getting to shoot people!”
The modern version would be “I call running the Spotify!”
I mean, it’s still America.
I guess the location of the shooting has changed though. It should mean having your desk at the front of the classroom by the teacher’s desk now.
The amount of naval terminology that has stuck around in English is mind boggling.
Ahoj! I’m Czech. We don’t even have any access to sea…
No direct access, but “jump into the Elbe and wait” is still a valid strategy…
… And hope no German bridge crushes on you!
And other shit.
Gringo explaining a horse carriage: Imagine a gun
And the kids have been shouting shotgun from then on.
In the time of horse drawn carriages, wouldn’t the rifle be a more common weapon?
Easier to aim a shotgun went bouncing around on the stagecoach, running from bandits.
oh I thought it was from the moonshine age, I guess horse buggies make more sense lol
Whenever someone says “Shotgun” I can only think of the drive-by scene in Boyz 'n Da Hood.
The apocryphal story is actually kind of interesting.
Roads and right of way established during the pre-firearm era were that you’d ride on the left, with people going the opposite way on your right. This was so you could use your dominant hand (usually your right) to use a sword to defend yourself.
Roads after firearms were available often established right of way with riding on the right, with oncoming traffic on the left. This is because when you shoulder a firearm on your right shoulder it’s easier to aim left.
Stagecoach drivers would sit in the left seat, with the extra person sitting on the right, holding a shotgun, hence the colloquial term for the front passenger seat.
I have no idea how true this is, but it makes for an interesting story.
In Europe it was because of Napoleon. In the US is was because of how wagons were made, according to this article:
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/02/business/why-americans-drive-on-the-right-and-the-british-on-the-left
I’d been told it was a gangster thing: passenger seat shoots out the window for a drive-by.
I thought it was a US police thing, because the passenger seat is where the shotgun is commonly holstered.
Every American police car I’ve seen has the gun rack in the trunk.
. Modern cop cars may be different.
That makes a bit more sense if true. I don’t easily picture 1920s gangsters wielding shotguns for a drive-by.
The correct answer afaik is stagecoach, but tbf Clyde Barrow did use cut down Browning A5s in robberies. While I don’t have any information on whether or not they were fired from a moving vehicle, it could have happened.
This phrase has confused me so much when I heard it in one of Taylor Swift’s songs.
Then my Texan cousins explained it to me on a visit one day. I was still confused. Now I’ve found out it’s a stage coach thing. Interesting.
It’s used in the UK too
Fortunately I can’t say I’ve ever met anyone who uses it. I believe it though, I’m seeing American-isms creep in to regular speech more and more.
Can’t say I like it.
Yes, because we invariably import whatever bollocks the US says or does.
We don’t even SAY bollocks in the US.
I literally had to look it up because I didn’t know what the word meant, that was just a couple of years ago. I’m a native speaker.
Yep, and we thank you for the word soccer too.
Well, for my world it’s interesting because the passenger seat is just that. But before the evolution of tech and everything else heavily affected travel, the front passenger seat held importance in that the one who sits there can assist in reading a map, adjusting the passenger wing mirror, monitoring the side directly while parking or other tight manoeuvres, emotional support for police stops, handling a drink so the driver can hydrate without endangering anyone, an extra pair of eyes on the less vital areas etc… Now these benefits of a primary passenger are almost nonexistent, as better driver-side controls, digital maps, GPS and TTS, and stricter road safety laws (banning consumption while driving) reduce the need for an assistant driver.
wait, it’s illegal to drink anything while driving in places? when did that happen?
In some place that counts as distracted driving and you can get fined for it.
