Little Useless Gun: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

A character treats a small firearm with contempt. The firearm will likely be physically small and will probably fire small-caliber ammunition, which is considered by some users to be weak.

 

For the opposite end of the spectrum, see [[Hand Cannon]].

 

== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==

* In ''[[Master Keaton]]'', a cop tells a suicidal man not to shoot himself in the head with a .22, because it's more likely to leave him an invalid than to kill him.

** The justification for her choice of weapon seems to be that, in accordance to this trope, it's treated as a nonlethal weapon due to its small caliber. Thus, she can use it with impunity and not worry about deaths or serious collateral damage (which is a reasonable concern for an insurance representative). Her partner Millie uses the opposite approach, a huge stun-gun whose slugs spread out in to a cross pattern to reduce stopping power. This would similarly be potentially lethal in real life, but in the work it just knocks people over. At one point she knocks over a truck by shooting it twice.

* Subverted on ''[[Black Lagoon]].'' While Fritz Stanford is bragging about the enormous handgun he plans to use to kill Revy, she's loading her regular handgun, a custom-built 9mm Beretta, and shoots him before he can finish speaking. Before she finishes him off, she tell him that "if you can hit your target, pretty much any gun will do the trick."

 

* In the ''[[Sin City]]'' comic, ''A Dame To Kill For'', the main character, Dwight, is shot up pretty badly by the title character, a [[Femme Fatale]] to the last. As [[Heroic Sociopath|Marv]] is hauling him to Old Town, he comments: "...Here I am jabbering with you leaking all over the place. You're damn lucky all that dame had was a .32 -- we wouldn't even be having this conversation if she'd used a real gun on you. Even so, getting shot in the face isn't high on my list of how to have a good time."

** And later, when Dwight {{spoiler|changes his faces}} and comes back to confront said [[Femme Fatale]], all he's able to conceal up his sleeve is "a crummy little .25", all six rounds of which is nowhere near enough to stop Manute.

 

== [[Film]] ==

* In ''[[Kiss Kiss Bang Bang]]'', Gay Perry has a tiny Derringer that he refers to as his "faggot gun," because "it's only good for a couple of shots and then you gotta drop it for something better". Given the film's penchant for subversion, the little gun ends up being quite fatal.

* Invoked in ''[[Back to The Future]] Part III'', where Buford "Mad Dog" Tannen threatens Doc with a derringer specifically because it will make his death slow and painful, mentioning a guy who took ''two days'' to die of his wounds.

* In ''[[In Bruges]]'', Ray steals a Smith & Wesson Model 60 from Eirik and shoots [[Eye Scream|him in the eye]] [[Combat Pragmatist|with a blank round]]. When Ken comes to kill him and prevents his suicide, he compares weapons with him, lamenting that he has "a bloody girl's gun".

* In ''[[Boondock Saints]] II'', Romeo is given a .22 caliber pistol on his first vigilante mission as a form of hazing.

** In particular, he claims to have seen shots from a .38 bounce off a car windshield, something shots from his .44 magnum have never done.

* At the end of ''[[Die Hard With a Vengeance]]'', McClane asks for a gun and is given a tiny revolver of which he is extremely disdainful. Subverted in that he manages to take out the helicopter attacking him with it by shooting some overhead power lines.

 

== [[Literature]] ==

* In the first of the [[Tom Clancy]]'s ''Op Center: Net Force'' books, a female assassin carries around a .22 pistol, favoring its discretion and concealability. She then proceeds to work around the "stopping power" issue by shooting her target in the [[Eye Scream|eye]].

** [[Clear and Present Danger]] has another aversion. A pair of assassins gets into a gun battle with an off-duty police officer and the neighbor kid fires on them with his .22 rifle. The police officer is killed and the assassins flee (the kid tries unsuccessfully to shoot them through their getaway car, but .22 rimfire bullets definitely don't have that ability). When investigators find their car one of the assassins has bled to death inside. The investigators reason that it was the kid who killed him, as the police officer had a subnose revolver at long range, while the kid had a rifle.

*** The .22 rounds don't kill instantly, either. One assassin gets hit in the head, but doesn't die until he goes to investigate his other wounds, which causes the weakened blood vessels in his head to let go, essentially a case of [[Your Head Asplode]].

* In the [[Dale Brown]] novel ''Shadows of Steel'', [[Big Bad]] Iranian general Buzhazi is nearly assassinated, but though he is wounded he doesn't die because he manages to get treatment in time. It is said that if the assassin had used a more powerful gun, he wouldn't have lasted long enough to get treatment and the attempt would have been successful.

 

* Averted in a conversation in ''[[Law and Order Special Victims Unit]]''. The team is discussing a murder that took place, where the victim was shot with a [[Hand Cannon|.44]]. Munch reckons that the large calibre weapon is strictly for an amateur who is [[Compensating for Something]] and reckons that a professional would go for two head shots with a .22.

 

== [[Tabletop Games]] ==

* Inevitable in [[Tabletop Games]] that don't have bleeding rules. Low-caliber guns have the worst damage of any weapon on a typical gun list.

** Averted by many other factions, digital weapons (that fit on a finger) are very much effective and in use by Inquisitors and nobles.

* ''[[Shadowrun]]''. Light and holdout pistols did Light damage, which on average resulted in one box of Physical damage. Characters could take 10 boxes of Physical damage before they even started to bleed out, and could take a number of additional boxes equal to their Body attribute before finally dying. In other words, to kill someone with a small pistol you'd have to hit them 10 times before they were even at risk of dying, and even then death wasn't inevitable if any form of healing were available.

 

== [[Video Games]] ==

** However the complete silence of the .22 makes it great for assassinations since if you can find a dark corner to hide in you can kill a target in the middle of a crowded room without anyone noticing, and the combination of high critical rate, high accuracy, and low AP cost means that you can take down an unarmored target with headshots almost as easily as with your big hand-cannons. Not to mention that it's the only gun that you can take in places where weapons are forbidden without a high sneak skill. The 9mm is still useless once you can find anything else.

** ''Silent Assassin'' also had the Makarov and .22 pistols, both of which had little stopping power. Of course, if you ''need'' stopping power, [[Stealth Based Game|you're a bad player.]]

* The Derringer in ''[[Call of Juarez]]'' is typical of this trope.

 

== [[Western Animation]] ==

** Another, showing a scene from [[Show Within a Show|McBain]] portrayed [[Da Chief|his superior]] attempting to get him to surrender his [[Hand Cannon]] for something smaller. Mc Bain asks how he is supposed to avenge his partner with a pea shooter. When the chief tells him he is supposed to do things by the book, he shoots it, quipping "Bye, book".

* Parodied in the ''[[Looney Tunes]]'' short "Drip-Along Daffy", where burly outlaw Nasty Canasta is felled by a wind-up toy soldier whose tiny rifle packs a surprising amount of heat. Had Canasta [[Tempting Fate|not picked it up and raised it at face level to laugh at it]], he might have gotten off easy.

 

== [[Real Life]] ==

* The Israeli Defense Force once supplied its troops with a Ruger 10/22 as a "less than lethal" sniper weapon. Reality (and a judge and a number of dead bodies) eventually forced them to remove the classification.

** Especially since the goal of a gun fight is not to ensure your attacker dies, but to ensure ''you'' live. It doesn't really matter if the bad guy dies if he ends you in a brutal fashion before finally dying. In a defensive situation, it behooves you not to have to wait an hour for your assailant to bleed to death. This is in large part why (in the USA at least) police departments stopped using the .38 as their service weapon in the early '90s. As Massad Ayoob wrote in his book ''In The Gravest Extreme'', the purpose of using a defensive gun is to stop someone from hurting you. Any bullet can kill someone, but it can't reliably stop them.

** That said however, getting shot in a not-immediately-lethal fashion will still make your average would-be robber reconsider their options (not to mention hurt like hell), so smaller calibres can be surprisingly effective as pure self-defence weapons.

** That must be the only gun that is potentially more lethal if you ''throw'' it.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Guns and Gunplay Tropes]]