If people making a game where guns are a heavy focus don't know anything about guns...

You end up with shit like Cyberpunk's magazine fed revolvers.

Guns aren't rocket appliances, you don't need to spend years obsessing about them to know how they work.

Like, what if someone made a racing game with zero idea how a car actually worked?

Doing research should be a pretty low bar

When this bit made it in to snake eater, folks realized Kojima is really enthusiastic about guns. It's been there in the earlier games, but yeah, developers are not even taking modicum research when designing current military tech.

There might be some truth to aspects being made here, but overall yes I completely agree I think this is leaning precisely into the kind of worship of the aesthetics of violence/guns that leads to things like the fatal shooting of Halyna Hutchins by Alec Baldwin on the film set for the movie "Rust".

https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/11/23/alec-baldwin-threatened-to-assault-30-rock-director-was-challenging-on-show-new-book-says/amp/

If you want to learn how to safely handle a firearm or other weapon and integrate that knowledge into the games you make, cool.... and I mean I guess this is news? but it turns out integrating genuine outside knowledge into video games can be interesting. However you could have chosen literally any other hobby or niche body of knowledge to obsess about and integrate into your video game development and gotten a similar if not larger return in your investment of effort spent not directly practicing getting better at making video games.

By the logic being argued here about weapons, would be game developers should prioritize becoming experts at fishing wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy before guns because fishing mechanics are in an absurd amount of video games and no matter what type of game you make you can probably integrate a fishing minigame into it. Further, it is very rare that game developers actually try to create realistic fishing games even though there is evidently a lot of interest in fishing in videogames.

Also... Euro Truck Simulator 2 has sold 13 million copies... do we need to consider the fact that game developers should maybe get a commercial truck drivers license before developing games because of the indication of how clearly players desire realistic truck driving games?