Help me pleeeeez!

k as some of u know ive been making a platform game and i know their difficult but i think i might know a way to shoot right when u face right and left when u face left all i need is some help from ppl who r more experienced than me in actionscript. Ok cutting to the chase. wut i want to do is to be able to find out wut frame a movie clip is on, but i dont know how to do this. how does this go to the shooting? well i want to say something like: if the movie clip’s frame = 2 then this._x -= lasercounter; else this._x += lasercounter; do u kind of get it.
in shorter terms how can u find out wut frame a movie clip is on?