"Colt .45. Semi-automatic. PLAY-DOH!"
— Johnny-5, crumpling a gun in his hands, Short Circuit
Alice is up against someone who has a gun. Before the gunman can shoot her, Alice snatches the firearm and quickly disables it right in front of the gunman, either by taking it apart or smashing it entirely. Asskicking typically ensues.
Usually used to demonstrate the badassery of a given character, and also just looks awesome. The disassembly version can also be used to showcase their knowledge of firearms, while the destructive version usually involves Super-Strength of some kind. May involve Willing Suspension of Disbelief to enforce the Rule of Cool; this is largely not Truth in Television, as some cocked-and-locked firearms cannot be taken apart without removing the magazine first (or even discharging or clearing the gun), and most of the ones that can still have plenty of little parts that need to be pulled out before the slide or barrel will come off, making disassembly a rather slow and non-dramatic process.
Still, many models of firearms are indeed very easy and quick to disassemble. One example is various military bolt-action rifles where the bolt can be removed in one motion (like the Mosin-Nagant 1891; some realistic movies and books even describe removing bolts to temporarily disable the rifles of POWs or arrested friendlies while still making them haul the bastards around). Another is handguns like Beretta 92 and SIG P22X series; these feature a disassembly lever that allows one to take the slide off the frame in one motion (after dropping the magazine). Both tricks are completely impractical in a fight, though.
Not to be confused with Gun Stripping, where the character has plenty of time to take apart the firearm, and is usually doing so in order to clean or service it.
Sometimes begins with a Distract and Disarm. Might involve Not With the Safety On, You Won't. If the weapon was unloaded or otherwise disabled before the wielder even picked it up, that's It Works Better with Bullets. When applied to weapons getting broken in general to demonstrate the breaker's power against the owner, see Wrecked Weapon.
See also Guns Are Worthless, Blasting It Out of Their Hands, Quick Draw, and Forced Friendly Fire.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Golden Kamuy:
- In an early chapter, Sugimoto, armed with a rifle, takes on a soldier wielding a combat knife, at close range. At first Sugimoto wants to take the guy alive, so he uses his gun as a club; once he realizes just how skilled his opponent is, he flips the guy on his back and uses the momentary distance to point his rifle at the guy's head—only to see that his opponent managed to remove his rifle's bolt while in mid-flip. Since it's a bolt-action Type 30 Rifle, it's possible to remove the bolt in a single motion.
- Much later, Sugimoto himself does an interesting variation on this trick: when attacked at close range by several attackers with rifles, he manages to remove the bayonets from their rifles (one while it is stuck in his side) and use the blades as weapons.
Comic Books
- Batman, due to his Does Not Like Guns nature, frequently disassembles whatever firearm he's taken from a mook. He'll even do this to his fellow heroes, particularly if he thinks they can't be trusted not to kill. In The Dark Knight Returns, he breaks a shotgun in two.
- The Flash is fond of doing this, though in his case it's mostly justified by Super-Speed.
- G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero (Marvel): In issue #26, the Soft Master disassembles the handgun of a young hoodlum trying to hold up his store, removing the magazine and ejecting the round in the chamber.
Fan Works
- Little Hands, Big Attitude: Silver, supercharged by Shadow, uses his telekinesis to completely take apart Agent Stone's mech. He doesn't destroy the individual components; instead within a single instant he cleanly separates all different materials from each other, such as removing wires from their casing or separating plastic from metal. Even Silver is completely floored by his stunt.
Film
- In 5 Card Stud, some gold miners are concerned that there's a killer loose and the marshal can't or won't do anything about it, so they march towards the marshal's office, one of them carrying a rifle, intent on taking the law into their own hands. One of the marshal's deputies accosts them, takes the rifle, and empties it of shells. He then asks the miner what he will do if he returns the rifle to him. When the miner says he will reload it and continue on to the marshal's office, the deputy smashes the rifle against the side of a building before handing the remains back to him.
- Avengers: Age of Ultron: Quicksilver uses his superspeed to snatch a pistol from Arms Dealer Ulysses Klaue and instantly unload and disassemble it, lining the parts and rounds neatly up on the table next to him. Klaue is surprised but quickly regains his cool.
- The Bourne Identity: Jason Bourne disarms two Swiss police officers and ends up holding one of their sidearms. He dismantles it in about half a second and runs away, shocked by his ability to do this in the first place.
- Captain America: Civil War: During the Winter Soldier's escape, he tries to shoot Tony Stark. Tony grabs the pistol by the front of the barrel with a cybernetic gauntlet. When the gun fires, the bullet is blocked by the gauntlet. Then, when he's kicked away, the slide comes off in Tony's hand.
- The Dark Knight:
- In his introductory scene at court, a witness "testifying" against Salvatore Maroni pulls a gun on Harvey Dent and pulls the trigger, but it fails to go off. Harvey punches the man in the face, takes the gun, disassembles it, and lays it in front of Maroni while telling him what he did wrong.
Dent: Carbon fiber, .28 caliber, made in China. If you want to kill a public servant, Mr. Maroni, I recommend you buy American.- When the Joker's men attack Bruce Wayne's penthouse, Bruce grabs a mook's double-barrelled shotgun, clubs him in the face with it, then disassembles the gun and drops the pieces on the floor, all without breaking stride. note
- Used as a Revealing Skill in The Gray Man (2022). When CIA assassin Sierra Six does this to his target's pistol, the target calmly mock-shoots him with the now useless gun and throws it away, then explains that he's actually Sierra Four — he's been sent to kill one of his own.
- One of the first fights in Interceptor (2022) has J.J. and a Giant Mook fighting over her M17 pistol. The mook is gripping it by the barrel, so she detaches the frame from the slide and uses it to stab him in the eye.
- Ip Man manages to do this to Inspector Li's service revolver, somehow popping out the cylinder in spite of the thick metal pin keeping it attached to the gun.
- The titular character of John Wick 1 does this to a mook mid-fight, hitting the mag release of his Glock and racking the slide in the same motion, completely unloading the gun before the mook has time to process what just happened.
- Kingsman: The Secret Service: Towards the end of the church melee, Harry Hart gets hold of a Beretta 92F and — having emptied the magazine — detaches the frame from the slide and uses them to stab someone in the neck.
- In Lethal Weapon 4, Wah Sing Ku escapes a Mexican Standoff this way, yanking the slide off of Riggs' Beretta in one sudden move.
- Logan: Wolverine snatches a shotgun off a rancher and butt-strokes him with it, then breaks it in half. The man Wolverine is protecting has no idea that he's a mutant, so is just as startled and confused as the villains, asking if Wolverine has military training.
- In Mad Max: Fury Road, Max manages to slam the magazine release on Furiosa's Glock, causing the magazine to drop out for Nux and the Wives to fight over. She still has one in the chamber, but he pushes the gun away before she can pull the trigger.
- In The Naked Gun (2025), Frank Drebin Jr. first disassembles a gun, then crumples one up like it's made of paper, then bites off and eats the end of the barrel of a third.
- Rebel Ridge: Ex-Marine Terry prefers to handle his opponents up-close, as he's a close-combat specialist. He's also strictly non-lethal. Multiple times throughout the film, he confronts some Dirty Cop who thinks his gun gives him an advantage over Terry, and his usual opening move is to grab the gun and disable it somehow, often by ejecting the magazine or emptying the cylinder.
- One example combines this with It Works Better with Bullets: during the climax, Terry takes one cop's shotgun, rapidly cocks it to eject all the shells, then throws the gun into another cop's face to distract him. Later, the first cop grabs the same shotgun and dramatically points it at Terry while he's distracted, only to pull the trigger on an empty tube.
- RoboCop (1987): Early after his Emergency Transformation, Robocop grabs a thug's assault rifle by the barrel and folds it neatly in half. He doesn't even take it away, just ruins the barrel to the point it'll never fire again.
- Rush Hour (1998): When Detective Lee comes to the consulate and beats up the FBI agents guarding the front door, he takes one of their guns and disassembles it, apologizes, and finds another way in.
- In Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, a mook attempts to shoot Holmes with a top-break revolver at point-blank range. Holmes grabs the revolver out of the mook's hand, empties the cylinder with one motion, and then hands the gun back to the mook.
- In Short Circuit, a villain pulls a gun on the Johnny 5, who takes it out of his hand and destroys it.
Johnny 5: Colt .45 Semi-automatic. [crushes the gun and gives the villain a Death Glare] Play-doh.
- At the start of Steel Rain, the protagonist Eom is apparently selling stolen drugs to a black-market dealer in North Korea, only to be arrested by a policeman. As he's a former North Korean intelligence operative, Eom deftly removes the pistol from the cop's hands and removes the magazine and slide, while explaining that he's actually selling his own prescription drugs.
- In TENET, the Protagonist uses this move in the Action Prologue, apparently being strong enough to rip the slide off a handgun while the rest of it is held in his opponent's hand. It then gets literally inverted in a later fight scene, when he fights a time-inverted man who reassembles a gun and thrusts it into the Protagonist's hands during the sequence. This is also a clue that the Protagonist is actually fighting his future self, who is actually disassembling the gun from his perspective to prevent a paradox.
- Watchmen has Laurie a.k.a. Silk Spectre snatch a Beretta 92F off her government handler and take it apart in less than a second. The Beretta is typically used for such scenesnote because you can disassemble it without even removing the magazine; just by pushing a button on one side of the gun and turning the very convenient disassembly lever on the other, which can be done using only one hand, the slide can be pulled off the frame towards the disassembler. With practice, it can be done in one fluid motion. Ejecting the round in the chamber is not necessary.
- Parodied in Wayne's World when Garth grabs Russell's flashlight out of his hand and immediately opens it and removes the batteries.
- Played for laughs in You Don't Mess with the Zohan when the lead character takes apart a goon's assault rifle ridiculously fast.
Literature
- Artemis Fowl: Played realistically in The Eternity Code. Juliet snaps off the firing pin/hammer off the moon's gun as he brandishes it, making it only possibly useful as a hammer.
- In the BIONICLE novel Island of Doom, Reidak snatches one of Lewa Nuva's Air Katanas and breaks it in half together with Lewa's attempt at a Badass Boast, which Reidak then one-ups with a boast of his own.
Lewa: Why don't you make things ever-easy and surrender? We are Toa Nuva, after all. We quick-defeated the Rahkshi. So—
Reidak: Rahkshi, huh? I pick my teeth with Rahkshi. - In Feet of Clay, Dorfl does this when he goes to the slaughterhouse for payback after being given free will and someone attacks him with a hammer.
- In Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, when Hagrid is banging on the door of the shack in which the Dursleys are trying to hide from the Hogwarts letters, Vernon comes downstairs with a shotgun. After Hagrid breaks down the door, Vernon threatens him with it, and Hagrid yanks the gun out of his hands, ties the barrel in a knot, and tosses it in the corner. In the film version, Hagrid bends the barrel straight up toward the ceiling; Vernon is still able to fire without the gun blowing up in his face.
- Inversions: Two thugs try to rape Vossil while she's bathing, and end up unconscious with their knife blades mysteriously bent backwards.
- Kris Longknife: Kris takes to ordering surrendering ships to take sledgehammers to the electrical busbars powering their guns in the frequent occurrence that she doesn't have manpower or time to put a prize crew aboard.
Live-Action TV
- In The Adventures of Superman, after a villain is done Shooting Superman, Superman often grabs the barrel and twists it into a curve so it's unusable.
- In one episode of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Coulson laments that he used to be able to do this, but lost the knack after dying and being resurrected.
- In The Beauty Queen of Jerusalem, after witnessing an innocent Arab passerby being murdered by the Irgun group she joined, Rachelika leaves but has to give her gun back to the group. So Rachelika destroys her gun before giving it back. Hey, they didn't tell her that the gun had to be intact.
- Better Call Saul: In "Pimento", when Mike is hired as a bodyguard for a drug deal, his fellow bodyguard is a Gun Nut who thinks Mike will be useless on the job because he didn't bring a gun. Mike says "If I need one, I'll take one of yours", and the Gun Nut dares him to try, pointing a gun right in his face. Mike easily takes the gun away from his attacker and ejects the magazine and the bullet in the chamber. He then uses the empty gun to hit him in the throat and take him out of the fight completely.
- Buffy the Vampire Slayer: In "Phases", Buffy finds herself up against a werewolf hunter. Annoyed by his misogynistic manner, she takes away his rifle and bends it in half.
- Cowboy Bebop (2021): In the Action Prologue of "Cowboy Gospel", there's a variation where Spike Spiegel hits the magazine release button of his opponent's rifle during a fight.
- One episode of Criminal Minds has JJ eject her opponent's magazine and pull off the slide in one fluid motion, preempting a gunfight and allowing a prolonged hand-to-hand Designated Girl Fight.
- Daredevil (2015):
- Matt Murdock has a tendency to dismantle guns mid-combat to keep his enemies from using them.
- When taking out the Albanian hitmen who ambush Wilson Fisk as he's being transferred, Benjamin "Dex" Poindexter dismantles one of their guns and uses the pieces as daggers to kill two more of the attackers. Later in the season, after killing Jasper Evans with Karen's gun, he removes the slide from the gun before dropping it on the ground.
- Eliot Spencer from Leverage can do this and does it on a regular basis. Justified because he's one of the world's best fighters and he Doesn't Like Guns.
- Lost: Kate does this with instruction from Sayid in the second episode, right after Sawyer shoots the polar bear. Later, we learn that she didn't necessarily need it.
- Luke Cage (2016): Luke can take a gun and then use his Super-Strength to crush it in his bare hands.
- Pennyworth. In Alfred's club in the Soho Truce Zone, a member of the Raven Union ends a political argument by shooting his opponent in the foot. Alfred tells him that all firearms have to be checked at the door, and when he places a (still loaded) Walther P38 on the check girl's tray, Alfred not only unloads the pistol but strips it down as well, to the owner's annoyance.
- Person of Interest: In "Booked Solid", Reese removes the slide from Hersh's pistol after stabbing him non-fatally, taking it with him so Hersh can't reassemble it.
- The Punisher (2017): Downplayed in "Nakazat". When a porn photographer tries to pull a Sawn-Off Shotgun on Frank Castle, he grabs the shotgun while simultaneously opening the action so it can't fire. He then decides to keep the shotgun for his own use rather than destroy it.
- Star Trek:
- Star Trek: The Original Series: In "Space Seed", Khan grabs Kirk's phaser out of his hands and bends it in half.
- Star Trek: Picard: In "Assimilation", a man with a gun attempts to stick up Raffi as she walks past the Sanctuary District. It takes her a minute to realize that he's trying to take her money, since they don't have that in the 25th century. She then easily takes his gun, knocks him out, takes apart the pistol (scoffing at the antiquated projectile weapon), and scatters the pieces. And then she takes his money.
- In the Vengeance Unlimited episode against a rogue IRS agent, during the final confrontation, Mr. Chapel snatches his gun and empties it.
Video Games
- Batman: Arkham Series: In City, Origins and Knight, Batman can learn the Disarm and Destroy special combo move, which allows him to destroy weapons (including steel pipes, knives, and tower shields) during combat. When he uses it against henchmen armed with firearms, he pulls the weapon apart before dropping the pieces. In Origins, henchmen can pick up and reassemble their guns even if they've been destroyed this way, so keep your ears open for the Dramatic Gun Cock.
- In Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number, if Evan picks up a gun, he'll either disassemble it or unload it and toss the ammo to the ground.
- Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater: The Boss does this to Snake at least twice in cutscenes, destroying his sidearms in the process even while he was still wielding them. She does it to Ocelot once, but then gives him back the parts she removed rather than throwing them away. She also uses it as a tactic in the final fight if she manages to knock you onto the ground while you're holding a weapon. For gameplay reasons, this just means The Boss will scatter your intact weapon and its ammo around the battlefield, forcing you to scramble and retrieve them; it's also an incentive to use CQC on her rather than trying to shoot her.
Web Animation
- Awesome Series: "Metal Gear Awesome" has Snake take Meryl's gun, turn it into a balloon animal, and then eat it in front of her. Doesn't turn out to be the smartest solution when they then get surrounded by guards.
Webcomics
- Freefall: After Florence's ploy to pickpocket
her Restraining Bolt remote control succeeds, she crunches it into pieces using the bathroom stall door, then flushes the pieces down the toilet.
- Girl Genius:
- Jorgi disarms a Wulfenbach airship captain and then crushes her gun in a display of his Super-Strength during the siege of Mechanicsburg.
- Terebithia disarms the "Queen of Dawn" off-hand without even giving away to those around them that Zola had just tried to shoot Agatha and then "accidentally" snaps her small delicate gun in two.
- Grrl Power:
- Discussed in reference to Maxima's Super-Speed.
Maxima: And what if some yahoo with a concealed-carry decided to play hero?
Arianna: With you there? You could've disassembled his gun and done his taxes before he had it clear of the holster. - Later, we see Maxima take apart a grenade with Super-Speed.
- Discussed in reference to Maxima's Super-Speed.
- Near the end of Leftover Soup, Jamie is held at gunpoint by Roscoe Knight who thinks he killed his son Richard.note Jamie suddenly grabs the slide and yanks it backwards, before wrenching the gun out of Roscoe's hand, dismantling it, and tossing the pieces down a disposal chute.
- Noteworthy is that Jamie suspected the firing pin had been removed, and Roscoe managed to pull the trigger at least three times while being disarmed. When Jamie throw away the gun parts, it's revealed these include a firing pin, so if Jamie hadn't started by yanking the slide he'd have a couple extra holes by now. Jamie also has a noted history of acting recklessly when guns are pointed at him. The author commentary even stresses Do Not Try This at Home.
- The titular character of Schlock Mercenary subdues an entire group by disassembling all their guns.
Western Animation
- Gargoyles:
- Goliath does this to Elisa in the pilot episode, snatching her gun from behind and crushing it to scrap.
- Broadway does the same with a mook's gun in a later episode, having developed a great fear of guns after accidentally shooting Elisa with hers.