The good guys (the non-Red Shirt ones, at least — and sometimes even them, too) can stand in the middle of the firefight and never get hit, and can pick off any bad guy with even the most casually-aimed shot while the bad guys seem unable to hit the broad side of a barn.
This trope involves a degree of Truth in Television, in that by far most shots fired in firefights or combat are misses. Some sources report that in WWII, the average soldier needed to fire two hundred rounds for every hit scored on an enemy. So the fictional bad guys don't necessarily actually suffer from unrealistic inaccuracy; rather, the heroes' fictional performance would probably count as Improbable Aiming Skills in real life. To make matters worse, though, most fictional bad guys exhibit lousy trigger discipline, always firing from the hip and in long bursts, even when firing at a lone target that sometimes isn't even shooting back, instead of looking down the sights and aiming.
Of course, the real reason for all this is the Anthropic Principle: if the mooks ever actually hit the main characters, the show would be over.
Bonus points if anyone says something to the effect of "whoever is the actual target of that shooter is the safest one here."
Obvious Sub-Trope of A-Team Firing. Dodge the Bullet is the inverse of this. For the bladed weapon variation, see Never Bring a Knife to a Fist Fight. The flip side of Improbable Aiming Skills. The use of More Dakka can either overcome this, or make it even sillier. When the bullets don't just spray around the target, but consistently hit where the target was a moment ago, it's a case of Hero-Tracking Failure. See also Plot Armor for the reason the bad guys are such lousy shots. When the enemies vastly outnumber the heroes, their incompetence is a symptom of Conservation of Ninjutsu. Compare Powerful, but Inaccurate, when the inaccuracy is a property of the weapon rather than the wielder. See also Amusingly Awful Aim.
Named for the obvious Star Wars reference, in which setting the mooks all seem to be visually impaired, though there is one explanation for their seeming ineptitude — but for the Trope Namer, see the Tabletop Games section below.
