Little Useless Gun: Difference between revisions

 

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.

* In ''[[Desert Punk (manga)|Desert Punk]]'', Kosuna shoots one goon coming at her several times with her small handgun and he barely even flinches. Although she learns a ridiculously huge gun wouldn't be best either, Kanta does end up getting her a more powerful one by the end.

 

* 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.

* 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.

* Completely subverted in ''[[Men in Black (film)|Men in Black]]'' with the "noisy cricket". It's the size of a small, cheap water pistol, and it blows a hole through a completely sealed door. And sends you [[Blown Across the Room|flying the opposite direction]] almost as fast.

* In ''[[Mr. and Mrs. Smith]]'', the eponymous characters are getting guns from a stash. Mrs. Smith complains when she is given the visibly smaller "girl gun."

* 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 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.

 

* 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.

** In ''[[GURPS]]'' the .22 Derringer has almost no chance of killing someone unless you shoot them a ''dozen'' times,<ref>or hit them [[Subsystem Damage|in the brain]]</ref> although an incredibly lucky shot could be dangerous.

** 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.

** 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.

* The [[AKA-47|SC Pistol]] from ''[[Splinter Cell]]'', while offering a ''20 round'' magazine, has pathetically little stopping power and even a headshot is not a guaranteed kill. [[Truth in Television]] for the Five [[Se7en]], particularly if using [[Armor-Piercing Attack|armor piercing]] rounds.

** ''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.

 

* ''[[Schlock Mercenary]]'' involving professionals, usually it leans toward the other end of the spectrum, but there still are some. Including what Kathryn [http://www.schlockmercenary.com/2011-01-28 dubbed] "a girly-gun" (later said to be 4-mm holdout). Kathryn herself ''is'' [[The Gunslinger|good enough with pistols]] to land an immediately fatal headshot with it without taking time to aim, but after that she upgraded to the next trophy gun.

 

== [[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.

* The [[wikipedia:FP-45 Liberator|FP-45 Liberator]]. This pistol was intended to be dropped in large quantities into France during [[World War Two]] for use by [[La Résistance]], the idea being that they could use it to pop an occupying soldier and then acquire his weapon. Stopping power wasn't necessarily the problem (it was chambered for the beefy .45 ACP round), but its range was pitiful and the gun itself could be built more quickly than it could be reloaded. It was often described as "a great weapon with which to obtain another weapon".

** Its successor, [[wikipedia:Deer gun|The Deer Gun]] was chambered for 9mm and intended for use in Vietnam. The idea was scrapped when the conflict escalated into a full scale war. Like the Liberator, it is now considered a collector's item, putting it square into the [[Rare Guns]] category.

 

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[[Category:Guns and Gunplay Tropes]]