Science & Tech Quote by Craig Bruce

Spray-and-pray, elevated to philosophy. Craig Bruce’s line works because it’s both tactical advice and a bleak little joke about how people behave when they don’t actually know what they’re doing. “Shooting in the dark” isn’t just literal low visibility; it’s uncertainty, ignorance, panic, acting on bad information. The “machine gun” punchline turns that into an escalation: if you can’t aim, increase volume. More noise, more output, more chances that something - anything - lands.

The specific intent reads like hardboiled compression, the kind of tough-guy pragmatism you’d expect from a crime writer: don’t romanticize precision when conditions make precision impossible. But the subtext is nastier and more contemporary. It’s a perfect metaphor for modern decision-making under anxiety: overwhelmed institutions, leaders, and internet commenters “fire” opinions, policies, and takes in bursts, hoping sheer quantity will substitute for clarity. Accuracy becomes optional; impact becomes the metric.

The line’s irony is that a machine gun doesn’t actually solve darkness; it just amplifies consequences. It widens the blast radius, increasing collateral damage while preserving the shooter’s deniability: you can always claim you were just reacting. That’s the cynicism embedded here - not that uncertainty exists, but that our instinct is to answer it with excess.

Contextually, coming from a late-20th-century thriller sensibility, it nods to an era where firepower and improvisation are sold as competence. The joke lands because it’s funny, and then it keeps landing because it’s uncomfortably true.