History Main / GunStripping

Not to be confused with ExtendedDisarming.

* ''Series/{{Luther}}''. A pistol has been left at a murder scene to frame Luther, so he rubs it with a cloth in an attempt to remove his traces from the weapon. [[TokenEvilTeammate Alice Morgan]] rolls her eyes at his ineptness, takes the pistol off Luther, and does a more thorough job.

* ''Series/{{Luther}}''. A pistol has been left at a murder scene to frame Luther, so he rubs it with a cloth in an attempt to remove his traces from the weapon. [[TokenEvilTeammate Alice Morgan]] rolls her eyes at his ineptness, takes the pistol off Luther, and does a more thorough job.
* In a late ''Series/ThirdRockFromTheSun'' episode, Sally shows off her military skills by disassembling then reassembling a gun in front of her boyfriend, a police officer. He responds by saying "Any time I've taken my gun apart, I had to buy a new gun."
* In ''Series/TheFlash2014'', Captain Cold regularly takes apart and inspects his freeze ray. As a result, he knows how to repair it and he's memorized all the parts, so he can instantly tell if it has been sabotaged. At Cold's urging, his partner Heat Wave has started to do the same with his flamethrower.
* {{Parodied}} in a segment of ''Series/MysteryScienceTheater3000'', in which a blindfolded Mike has to reassemble his field-stripped RobotBuddy Tom Servo. (Who is somehow still able to talk, despite being disassembled into his component parts on a table.)
* ''Series/TheNewAvengers''. In "Target", Purdy's pistol jams in a ShootingGallery so she has to strip it down and fix it before another robot target pops up.
* ''Series/PersonOfInterest''.
** In a flashback to when he was a government assassin, John Reese is shown doing this in a safehouse while he waits for extraction, likely to calm his nerves.
-->'''Stanton:''' How many times are you gonna clean that thing?
-->'''Reese:''' In the Army, they taught us the fastest way to get shot was to fail to clean your weapon.
-->'''Stanton:''' In the Marines, they taught us the fastest way to clean your weapon was to shoot a couple people with it.
** [[DoesNotLikeGuns Harold Finch]] isn't happy when Reese is cleaning a large SniperRifle on his [[WhyWeCantHaveNiceThings antique desk]].
--->'''Finch:''' I wish you wouldn't do that here.
--->'''Reese:''' [[DeadpanSnarker When I do it in the park people look at me funny.]]
** In "Provenance", Reese boasts of being able to fieldstrip a .45 upside down in the dark (while [[CantTieHisTie completely failing to do up his bow tie]]).
** In "Booked Solid", Reese removes the slide from [[EvilCounterpart Hersh]]'s pistol after stabbing him non-fatally.

* ''Series/SpeerUndEr'': When Speer first meets (then Chancellor) Hitler, the latter is busy disassembling and cleaning his sidearm, and only barely glances at the architectural plans for an upcoming rally he is supposed to evaluate before dismissing him.

[[folder:Tabletop Games]]
* In ''TabletopGame/{{GURPS}}: High-Tech'' the perk "Armorer's Gift" lets the character assemble or disassemble a gun in record time without even thinking. The extreme familiarity with guns helps if a weapon jams.
* ''TabletopGame/{{Warhammer 40000}}'': "Any [[BadassArmy Cadian]] who can't field-strip his own lasgun by the [[ChildSoldiers age of 10]] [[TheSpartanWay was born on the wrong planet]]."
* ''TabletopGame/FengShui'' has a Gun Schtick called "Dismantle Gun" that allows gunmen to pull that Creator/JetLi move from ''Film/LethalWeapon4'' on another guy's gun, using their Guns skill in place of Martial Arts. The Neat Freak gun schtick, which reduces the time needed to clear a jam, implies someone who does this quite regularly and otherwise knows how to take care of their guns.
[[/folder]]

* In ''VideoGame/MetalGearSolid3SnakeEater'', The Boss uses this as a combat tactic, by [[https://youtu.be/wMF0Y1yiBNw?t=159 disassembling her opponent's gun and throwing away the parts]] (spoilers, naturally). She later [[spoiler:uses the same trick in her boss battle, although you can pick up the parts and put them back together]].

* One scene in ''VideoGame/GalaxyAngel'' has Forte doing this with her revolver, while blindfolded. Ranpha tries to take one of the springs as a prank, but Forte quickly catches on.

* In [[http://www.the-whiteboard.com/autowb113.html this]] ''Webcomic/TheWhiteboard'' strip Doc manages to field strip Jinx's marker[[labelnote:*]]technical term for a [[PaintballEpisode paintball gun]][[/labelnote]] before he even finishes saying "Let's have a look" between the first two frames, leaving a bewildered Jinx wondering how Doc managed it.

* An episode of ''WesternAnimation/HerculesTheAnimatedSeries'' had Adonis, Icarus, and Hercules doing Spartan training, and part of the regime was to assemble a crossbow blindfolded.

[[folder:Web Original]]
* Parodied in "WebVideo/VideoGameHighSchool" in which two dueling parties have to reassemble broken-down partial keyboards.
[[/folder]]

* After being revived from a millennia-long sleep, Santana from ''Manga/JoJosBizarreAdventure'' picks up a gun, remarks how he's never seen a tool like this before, and takes it apart perfectly in seconds. Being a highly intelligent ancient superbeing certainly has its advantages.

* Nearly every night in ''Literature/KinosJourney''.

* Tenma does this in ''Anime/{{Monster}}'' as part of his training.
* ''Anime/{{Canaan}}'' is shown cleaning her handgun several times.

* Riza Hawkeye of ''Manga/FullmetalAlchemist'' cleans a blood-covered gun that was returned to her by Edward Elric.
* Several characters do this in ''VisualNovel/PhantomOfInferno''. In fact, it was Cal quickly stripping and reassembling Reiji's rifle by instinct and experimentation that tipped him off to the fact that she's actually a genius prodigy.
* For [[RaisedByWolves Sousuke Sagara]] in ''Literature/FullMetalPanic'', this is practically a ''hobby.''
* ''Franchise/LupinIII'': Lupin and Jigen are occasionally shown to do this, Jigen most often. One scene that shows the personalities of the cast: Lupin is flipping through random TV channels while slouching, Jigen is cleaning his gun, and Goemon is polishing his blade, while Fujiko walks in wearing a new dress.
** After kidnapping "Headhunter's Daughter", in ''Anime/LupinIIIDeadOrAlive'', the crew are back at one of their hideouts, and Lupin can be seen cleaning his Walther, making sure it's ready for action.

* Batman underwent the "undercover" variety, blindfold and all, in a story from the 1950s. Despite his [[DoesNotLikeGuns legendary disdain]] for guns, he reassembled the gun in record time.
* One of the Devil Due Publishing's ''Franchise/GIJoe'' comics showcased how Conrad Hauser (a.k.a. "Duke") was enlisted on the titular black-ops team: by being given a debriefing with his future superior "Hawk" wherein he's told that he's been classified as "killed in action" and to be part of the team. As all of this is being said, Hawk is calmly putting together a handgun right in front of Duke, and [[ImpliedDeathThreat it's fully reassembled, loaded, and cocked by the time Hawk is letting sink the "killed in action" part]] and [[GotVolunteered has gotten to the "are you with us, yes or no?" question.]]

* ''Fanfic/BoldoresAndBoomsticks'': Lieutenant Surge doubts Ruby Rose and Weiss Schnee will be useful, thinking they are just little girls. To prove themselves, Ruby swipes his Desert [[HoldYourHippogriffs Braviary]], then disassembles and reassembles it in seconds. This convinces him.
* In the Manga/GunslingerGirl fanfic ''[[https://archiveofourown.org/works/13853493 Ghosts]]'', Triela finds herself [[AccidentalTimeTravel on a World War One battlefield]] in the Dolomites. She starts to think that her [[BrainwashedAndCrazy conditioning has driven her insane]], then she sees her pistol is covered in mud, so she focusses on stripping and cleaning it to ground herself.

[[folder:Films -- Animation]]

[[folder:Films -- Live-Action]]

* ''Film/ShootEmUp'' has a scene where Smith drops his gun into a toilet bowl and has just a few minutes to strip and dry it before a hitman bursts through the door.
* ''Film/MajorPayne'' enjoys hanging upside down, blindfolded, and trying to clean his gun before his nose starts to bleed.
* In ''Film/DieAnotherDay'', Bond is cleaning his pistol in his office when he hears silenced gunshots outside, reassembles his pistol, and goes to see what's afoot. [[spoiler: After Robinson is killed, and Bond shoots through M to get her captor, R steps through the furniture to reveal the whole scene has been a VR training session.]]
* The comedy ''Film/JohnnyEnglish'' features a scene where the main character, played by Rowan Atkinson, assembles a pistol. When he is done, he holds it up to show, however the trigger is missing.

* In the 1982 Ozploitation movie ''Film/TurkeyShoot'' the female hunter is introduced assembling her SniperPistol blindfolded (in 32 seconds) while describing its capabilities to the other socialites taking part in HuntingTheMostDangerousGame.

* This happens in ''Film/WildTarget'' when assassin Victor Maynard is trying to teach Tony the tricks of the trade. Surprisingly Tony manages to put the gun together... but only to have it fly apart when he picks it up.
* Wax in ''Film/FromParisWithLove'' can strip a gun in the hands of someone else, while it's being pointed at him. He's that good. He also bypasses customs by transporting a stripped [[ICallItVera Mrs. Jones]] in energy-drink cans.
* Wah Sing Ku of ''Film/LethalWeapon4'', one of Creator/JetLi's few villain roles, can also do this, as demonstrated on Riggs' Beretta in that infamous scene.

* ''Film/{{Faster}}''. [[NoNameGiven The unnamed]] hitman is seen doing this, and a deleted scene has him calling his girlfriend who is busy assembling an H&K submachine gun -- a [[ChekhovsGun character-establishing scene]] for the original ending in which she is seen [[CycleOfRevenge planning her own revenge]] against Driver.
* ''Film/FlightOfTheIntruder'' includes a scene where [[GuyInBack Tiger Cole]] carries on a casual conversation with [[AcePilot Jake Grafton]] about why they aren't allowed to bomb the part of [[UsefulNotes/VietnamWar Hanoi]] where the North Vietnamese stockpile their [[AntiAir Surface-to-Air Missiles]], while he assembles a Colt M1911 that he was cleaning.
* In ''Film/FullMetalJacket'', Private Pyle's [[spoiler:SanitySlippage]] is hinted at by the way he talks through the reassembly of his rifle after disassembling it for cleaning.
* ''Film/TheAmerican''. The protagonist is a contract killer and gunsmith who's given the job of building an automatic rifle that's [[BriefcaseBlaster meant to be carried in a small space]]. When he hands it to the client for evaluation in [[IkeaWeaponry disassembled form]], he's shown glancing at his watch to time how long it takes her to put it together.
* In ''Film/TheProfessional'', Leon shows Mathilda how to disassemble a gun.

* ''Film/TheBourneIdentity''. After knocking out two policemen who insist on seeing his papers, Bourne ends up with one of their pistols. Shocked but still acting according to his (unremembered) training, he strips the slide off the pistol before throwing it away.
* In ''Film/TheDarkKnight'', after Sal Maroni's goon tries to shoot him, Harvey Dent does this with the man's gun as he struts away from the man he just pulverized, over to Maroni and puts the now-disassembled weapon right in front of him.
-->'''Dent''': Carbon fiber, .28 caliber, made in China. If you want to kill a public servant, Mr. Maroni, I recommend you buy American.
* In the South Korean gangster movie ''Film/ABittersweetLife'' (2005), Sun-woo goes to buy a handgun from an arms dealer working for a rival crime group. The dealer offers to show Sun-woo how to strip the handgun, demonstrating with his own weapon. While both weapons are partly disassembled, the dealer gets a phone call warning him who Sun-woo is, and both scramble to reassemble their guns so they can shoot the other.
* ''Film/{{Anthropoid}}'' has a scene in which one of the young women recruited into the plot grabs a pistol and field strips it, proving to her male counterparts that she's more than just eye candy.
* ''Film/MarsAttacks'': The EstablishingCharacterMoment of Billy Bob and the rest of his family includes Billy putting together an M-14 while blindfolded. Although the rest of his family treats him as TheAce because he's currently serving in the military, the scene provides a very big clue about how much of a dim-witted idiot he is: even after some time practicing, he's only gone down three seconds of the two minutes he used to take to fully make the assembling, and this is still greatly celebrated by him and his dad.

* ''[[Literature/TheBourneSeries The Bourne Identity]]''. The doctor who rescues Bourne, having taken note of the amnesiac's old scars, gives him an automatic pistol and tells him to "break it down." Much to Bourne's surprise, he knows exactly how to do so.

* In Franchise/TheDarkTower novel ''Literature/TheDrawingOfTheThree'', the Gunslinger Roland takes apart and cleans his guns after [[spoiler:losing some fingers to giant lobsters]]
** "Break the machine, clean the machine."

* Literature/{{Spenser}} does this in one of his books (Widow's Walk?). He has just killed someone who was trying to kill him, but is feeling guilty about it, and is angsting a little while he cleans his gun.

* Jo, from ''{{Series/Eureka}}'', is occasionally seen timing how long this takes her.

* In ''Series/BurnNotice'' Fiona has to do this to prove her skills when pretending to be a kidnapper. Her response is to ask if she has to do it blindfolded. Team Westen is also occasionally shown doing this for normal maintenance purposes, as in the penultimate episode of season 1.

* Two different episodes of ''Series/{{Firefly}}'' show Jayne and Mal, respectively, stripping and cleaning their various firearms on the dining room table (leading to walking in on Mal and startling him). Jayne is also shown honing a combat knife.

* {{Parodied}} in ''Series/{{Community}}'' season 3 episode 6, when Troy and other Air Conditioning Repair School candidates race against each other, blindfolded, to repair broken A/C units.
* Nolan in ''Series/{{Defiance}}'' performs the combat version of the strip when a racist mine owner is about to shoot an alien boy dead. He reaches up and pulls out the weapon's slide before it can fire.
* ''Series/{{Haven}}'': a character with FakeMemories has a disassembled gun on the table in front of her. When she sees someone being threatened, she automatically reassembles the gun and shoots without hesitation. This convinces her that there's something wrong with her memories since her current persona shouldn't have those skills.
* ''Series/TheBlacklist'': In "The Good Samaritan Killer," Reddington lays out an M1911 on a table and informs a hacker that field-stripping and reassembly will take about two minutes, and he had better transfer 500 million dollars in by the time Reddington's done.
* On ''Series/PrivateBenjamin1981'', in the first season finale when the girls are being tested at the end of basic training. While the tester is reading a card explaining she was being tested on this, Private Winter stripped and reassembled her rifle, then handed it back just as the tester said, "Go".

Since weapons require regular maintenance, this could be regarded as TruthInTelevision. An increasingly common action-flick variant is to have a character [[DisarmDisassembleDestroy partially disassemble an enemy's pistol while they're brandishing it]]. Can [[JustForPun overlap with]] GunPorn.

** And also not to drown the parts in oil, which can cause it to collect dirt or sand and cause a jam.[[note]]The standard-issue Italian light machine gun in WW2 was notorious for needing lots of maintenance to get it to run smoothly. The risk of it being over-oiled and thus prone to attracting sand and grit was held to be not ideal for an Army fighting in the desert of North Africa.[[/note]]

* The "cleaning their weapons" variant shows up a lot on ''Series/{{Supernatural}}''.

* {{Parodied}} in a segment of ''Series/MysteryScienceTheater3000'', in which a blindfolded Mike has to reassemble his field-stripped RobotBuddy Tom Servo. (Who is somehow still able to talk, despite being disassembled into his component parts on a table.)

* They're just cleaning their weapons, a {{boring but practica}} necessity for any gun wielder.

No, not [[YouCanLeaveYourHatOn that]] [[GunPorn kind of stripping.]]

This is where a character disassembles a weapon, cleans it and puts it back together. It comes in a number of varieties:

* They're just cleaning their weapons, a [[BoringButPractical boring but practical]] necessity for any gun wielder.

* The protagonists of ''Anime/{{Noir}}'' clean their guns regularly. In the first episode, Kirika does this while talking to Mireille (with her eyes closed) and reveals that due to her amnesia she has no idea where or how she learned to do this.

* Several characters do this in ''VisualNovel/PhantomOfInferno''. In fact, it was Cal quickly stripping and reassembling Reiji's rifle by instict and experimentation that tipped him off to the fact that she's actually a genius prodigy.

* ''Franchise/LupinIII'''s gunmen, Lupin and Jigen, are occasionally shown to do this. Jigen most often. One scene that shows the personalities of the cast is where Lupin is flipping through random tv channels while slouching, Jigen is cleaning his gun, and Goemon is polishing his blade, while Fujiko walks in wearing a new dress.

* The comedy ''Film/JohnnyEnglish'' features a scene where the main character, played by Rowan Atkinson, assembles a pistol. When he is done he holds it up to show, however the trigger is missing.

* ''Film/{{Faster}}''. [[NoNameGiven The unnamed]] hitman is seeing doing this, and a deleted scene has him calling his girlfriend who is busy assembling an H&K submachine gun -- a [[ChekhovsGun character-establishing scene]] for the original ending in which she is seen [[CycleOfRevenge planning her own revenge]] against Driver.

* Likewise in the 2017 Korean movie ''Film/TheVillainess''. [[spoiler:The first time, she assembles the weapon first but can't pull the trigger as she's an eight-year-old girl. Her mentor shoots the man for her but then says her life now belongs to him. As an adult assassin she assembles the weapon first and shoots her classmate, who is revealed to be wearing a bulletproof vest.]]

* In the ''Literature/{{Deathlands}}'' series, the companions' armorer, [[GunNut J.B. Dix]], not only constantly strips and cleans his multitude of weapons, but he does it up to five times in sequence and can tell at a single moment's notice when a gun is starting to wear and what exactly is wrong. And to top it all off, he knows by name almost every single make, model, and caliber of gun in circulation in Deathlands, as well as length of both gun and barrel, date of manufacture, and all specs by ''memory''. Every other character does this regularly as well. Given [[CrapsackWorld the]] [[ApocalypseHow nature]] of The Deathlands, it's quite literally a matter of life and death at any given time.

-->'''Finch:''' I wish you wouldn't do that here.
-->'''Reese:''' [[DeadpanSnarker When I do it in the park people look at me funny.]]

* ''Series/{{Treadstone}}''. As a ShootYourMate DeadlyGraduation, two brainwashed CIA agents are given a disassembled pistol with one bullet and told that only one of them can leave the room alive. This involves brutal hand-to-hand combat as they try to stop the other getting hold of the parts--at one point one man has assembled the gun only to find the other holding the bullet.

* Parodied in "WebVideo/VideoGameHighSchool" in which two dueling parties have to reassemble broken down partial keyboards.