Irritating Errors

I totally need some reader advice. I need to know just how important accuracy is to you in a story you’re reading.

Some glaring mistakes really annoy me in books. I was reading a story once where the author was describing the hero’s Glock and referred to it as a revolver. But Glock does not make revolvers. Glock is a company that makes striker-fired pistols (and knives, some clothes, and a couple other gun tools…but not Revolvers!).

Author Lady must’ve assumed the words pistol and revolver were synonymous and could be interchanged. But nope. Revolvers are only a type of pistol with a cylinder full of chambers to put each bullet in. The bullets in a Glock pistol are stored in the clip that gets shoved up into the butt of the grips. Anyway, the point here is this little detail of calling a Glock a revolver bugged me…for like ever. I'm not quite sure why.

And now that I’m writing my own stories, I’ve approached a problem in a manuscript I just sold, an error I actually know about (I’m sure I’ve made tons of mistakes I don’t know about, but this one I do). It’s still in the editing phase, so it’s possible I can fix it, but the question I’m asking is…is this problem such a big deal that I NEED to fix it, cause I’ll have to cut an entire scene to do that and I’d really rather keep that cute scene if I could.

Guess I should explain what I’m talking about, huh? There’s this scene in my story where the heroine gets flagged down by a cop on the Las Vegas Strip because she’s scantily dressed and this area has problems with illegal prostitution.

Now the state of Nevada has legalized prostitution, but the city of Las Vegas has not. I thought I was being all smart by making this cop harass her because I thought she was in the city limits. But recently I’ve learned The Las Vegas Strip is technically NOT in the Las Vegas city limits, and there is most definitely prostitutes legally working the Strip.

So, how big of a deal do you find this error? I’d like to keep the cop scene plus the line, “We can surely find a wedding chapel somewhere close. We’re on the freaking Strip for crying out loud,” but I could change it if it was bothersome.

Honestly, would this kind of inaccuracy irritate you? What kind of author mistakes DO irritate you?