No, Seriously, How Do the Guns Work on 'Westworld'?

Westworld just wrapped up its second season on HBO, and even after 20 episodes, fans of the show like science fiction editor John Joseph Adams are still no closer to understanding how the show's guns are able to kill robots but not humans. "The creators must have some idea how these guns work," Adams says in Episode 316 of the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy podcast. I want to know what they think, how they work. Because it doesn't make any sense to me." Season 2 includes a passing reference to "sim bullets," which makes Geek's Guide to the Galaxy host David Barr Kirtley think that there must be something special about the bullets themselves. "Maybe all the bullets have little incendiary things in them that cause them to self-destruct if they're flying in the direction of a guest," he says. "But in one scene they just hold the gun right against someone's chest, and I don't see how the bullet's not going to kill you from that range, even if it is sort of programmed to self-destruct." Writer Sara Lynn Michener wonders if maybe it's the guns that are special rather than the bullets. "You can have a gun that has paintball bullets in it, and you can have a gun that has real bullets in it," she says, "and the gun determines, 'All right, who am I aiming at?', and decides which bullet to release based on that." But science fiction author Anthony Ha says that even if there is an explanation for how the guns work, he still doesn't understand how humans are kept safe from other weapons such as arrows and axes. "It definitely drives me crazy," he says. "Do they have safeties on the swords here too?