At one end of the car T.R. was doing an interview with a tame journalist. With a couple of beers in him, he had become amusingly and colorfully exasperated by this person’s stubborn misunderstanding of the muzzle flash. "It is just a by-product . We would eliminate it if we could. If we used helium, it wouldn’t happen at all—and it wouldn’t matter because the purpose of that gas is just to be like the air in a peashooter. Unavoidably, some of it leaks out of the muzzle after the shell has departed. We control that as much as we can with check valves and such. But it’s safer to burn it off than to just have it drifting around god knows where." He caught the eye of an aide who seemed to specialize in media communications. "We need more animations or something to better illustrate that—it is just gonna be a chronic misunderstanding."