Backwards-Firing Gun

Putting a whole new spin on the Scope Snipe.

"They say that in the army
The guns are mighty fine
But when you pull the trigger
The bullets fly behind!"

— "They Say That In The Army''

This is a comedy weapon trope (although there are dramatic examples) featuring a gun designed or modified to fire backwards, tricking the person who uses it into shooting themselves. A common version seen in cartoons is to bend the barrel back into a "U" shape. Note that this trope may still come into play even if the person who might fire the gun would have to be really stupid not to notice the modification. It can also result from Finger in a Barrel.

These guns tend to show up in cartoons and spy genre pastiches.

Despite the trope title, other projectile weapons, such as a crossbow or hwacha, may be examples of this trope.

Compare Had the Silly Thing in Reverse.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• One story in the original Lupin the Third manga had Lupin himself being shot in the head by a gun that fired backwards, set up by Jigen no less. He gets better.
  • In Lupin III: The Italian Adventure, the Head of MI6 is killed this way near the end of the series when Leonardo Da Vinci tampers with his gun. What makes this worse is that he saw what Da Vinci was doing, and still tried to use the gun on him anyway, prompting death by stupidity.
  • A less fatal variation appeared in the TV Special Lupin III: Episode 0: First Contact where a mob boss tried to shoot Lupin with his own gun...only for a coiled boxing glove to fly out of the other end.
    • This could also be a homage to the very first series of Lupin, which included a variation of the same gag. In this example, the unfortunate "victim" is smacked in the face with a spiky ball rather than a boxing glove.
• One Piece: The anime only G8 arc had the Straw Hats (specifically Luffy, Ussop, Zoro and Robin) when the Marines corner them in a storage vault (They had raided it to recover the treasure they had gained from Skypeia). When a Marine Commander named Shepherd pulls out a gigantic gun dubbed the "Eagle Launcher" and goes to aim. But the Marines around him tell him he's pointing it the wrong way. When he doesn't believe them, he fires and predictably ends up hitting the troops behind him. What's more Robin uses her Hana Hana powers to take control of him and the gun to keep firing it, giving the Straw Hats a path to escape.
• Umineko: When They Cry: Battler suggests this to explain one crime.

Comic Books

• A Franco-Belgian comic book involving a zombie problem features semi-automatic pistols tricked out to fire their sliding barrel backwards, killing the user.
• Batman: In "Crime on the Wing" in Batman #33, The Penguin drops one of his gimmicked umbrellas while fighting Batman. Batman picks it up and fires it at the Penguin, only to discover that umbrella is booby-trapped, and fires a dose of gas back in the firer's face.
• Big Bang Comics: When Mad Scientist Dr. Dookmkopf attempts to shoot Super-Frankenstein with his sub-atomic annihilator. His assistant points out the annihilator has not been tested, Doomkopf dismisses this, saying he will test it on Frankenstein. The ray backfires and disintegrates Doomkopf, leaving everything else untouched.
• An issue of the Impulse comic book guest-starring The Riddler featured said Crown Prince of Conundrums with a revolver rigged to shoot backward.
• Mortadelo y Filemón:
  • In "El tirano", Mortadelo modifies General Panocho's rifle to be this. However, Filemón demands to try it, not knowing it's been rigged, and inadvertently shoots himself.
  • A variation in "El premio No-Vel": Villain of the Week Ten-Go-Pis infiltrates the TIA's headquarters and tampers with Filemón's gun, making it fire upwards and causing Filemón to shoot himself in the nose.
• Sin City: The Big Fat Kill had this happen to Jackie Boy. Miho puts a throwing spike into the barrel of Jackie Boy's gun. Despite Dwight's warnings not to fire the thing, he fires the weapon, and the slide flies backwards, impaling him through the head. This doesn't even kill him, just render him blind.
• Spy vs. Spy:
  • As seen in the page image, this occurs in one strip drawn for a series of paperbacks.
  • Another comic showed the White Spy tricking the Black Spy into launching a missile at him. The missile then broke apart and fired a rocket right back at the launcher.
• In the Stanley and His Monster mini-series, Ambrose Bierce gives Stanley a backwards-firing water pistol that squirts him in the face. (A bit more serious than it sounds — Bierce is trying to figure out who in the house might be a demon in disguise, and so the gun shoots holy water — but since Stanley's just a kid, he's okay if wet. The actual demoness who shows up a bit later to fetch the same demon Bierce is after back into Hell and ends up getting her own hands on the pistol and pulling the trigger is somewhat less amused.)
• Used seriously in one Torpedo story, where the killer commissions a special one-shot gun for this purpose, replacing a cop's gun with it.
• Urbanus: In "De dochter van Urbanus", there are three of them.

Comic Strips

• FoxTrot did this with a squirt gun in one strip.

Fan Works

• Boy With a Scar: In Chapter 29, when Mr. 9 and Miss Wednesday make it to Laboon's stomach, they're much more nauseous and dizzy than in canon. Luffy notices this trope in effect when they aim their bazookas, but doesn't say it until after they fire, accidentally blasting the steel door behind them rather than the stomach's ceiling. It doesn't kill them. But it sends them flying into the stomach acid.

Films — Live-Action

• One of these shows up in The American when George Cloony's character intentionally designs one for an assassin. Why would he do this? Simple: He figured out that the assassin would use the gun to kill him.
• In the 1989 Tamil film Apoorva Sagodharargal, the dwarf Appu tricks Sathyamoorthy into killing himself with a circus hand gun that shoots backwards.
• An improvised version occurs during a Gun Struggle in The Art of War (2000), with the protagonist jamming the barrel of The Dragon's pistol against a marble floor and forcing him to fire, causing part of the slide to fly back into his face from the confined gunshot.
• In Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever the big bad tricks a lackey into killing himself by giving him a backwards firing pistol. More of a loyalty test with a built-in punishment, since he was told to shoot himself with it.
• One of the many MacGuffins in Bullet Train is a booby-trapped gun rigged by the Prince, in hopes of using it against her father, the White Death, to exploit his habit of killing people who've wronged him with their own weapons. Her initial gambit doesn't go as planned, but he eventually kills himself with it in the end of the film, while aiming it at somebody completely different.
• Carry On Up the Khyber. The Afghans sabotage a British howitzer so it does this trope by shoving a huge cork in the barrel.
• In Casino Royale (1967), George Raft, who was best known for playing gangsters, is shot with such a gun.
• An alternate ending for Die Hard with a Vengeance has John McClane threatening Simon Gruber with a Chinese rocket launcher with the sights removed, making it impossible to tell which direction it would fire. He gave it to Gruber and allowed him to chose which way to point it in a variation of Russian Roulette. Gruber ultimately points the rocket launcher the wrong way.
• From Beijing With Love has which the assassin picked up from the table and use it as an assassination attempt, but only to hit herself in the arm. After explaining that it's a backwards-firing gun, she tries but hits herself again - it's called the "nicked gun" which fires backwards then forwards.
• Ghost Town (1988): Outlaws Ned and Billy get the drop on Langley and force him to hand over his shotgun. Before he does so, he surreptitiously plugs the barrel with mud. As soon as he gets the gun, Billy fires it at Langley. The plugged barrel makes it backfire; shooting Billy in the gut.
• Hulk. The Incredible Hulk bends back a tank's cannon so it's pointing at the wide-eyed crew. It can't fire this way of course, but they get the point.
• Jigsaw: The final trap in the original version of the Farm Trap sequence is a shotgun that was rigged to fire in reverse. One of the last two survivors grabs it, assuming that killing the other survivor is the only way out of the trap, and is killed when the trigger is pulled. This also destroys the key that would have let both survivors escape, which was hidden inside the shotgun shell.
• Law Abiding Citizen. A criminal is about to execute a policeman whose gun he stole, only for the 'cop' to reveal he's actually the man whose family he murdered ten years ago. Pulling the trigger releases needles in the grip injecting the criminal with a paralysing neurotoxin, so he can be tortured to death at leisure.
• Lost in a Harem: While escaping jail, Harvey threatens the guards with a rifle. Unfortunately, he holds it over a candle, causing it to bend backwards and fire through his hat when he pulls the trigger.
• The eponymous pistol in The Mexican killed its first victim this way when it was being test fired. This lead to the persistent rumor that the pistol was cursed.
• One of the victims on Mindhunters is killed by sabotaging his gun this way after he spends the entire movie complaining that he doesn't want to part with his gun.
• Happens with a wrongly assembled cannon in Buster Keaton's The Playhouse.
• In the 1966 film The Silencers (part of the Matt Helm series starring Dean Martin, a parody of the spy genre), a guard got hold of one of these guns, not knowing it was a trick gun, and pointed it at a woman, as she stoically awaited her fate (she didn't know what it was either). The guard pulled the trigger, shot himself, looked kind of puzzled, and shot himself again. She took the gun and fled. When she was later confronted by another guard, she pointed it at her own chest. The guard, thinking she was about to commit suicide, said "You don't have to do that." She replied "I must" and pulled the trigger, killing him.
• In Tomorrow Never Dies, the taser built into Bond's phone has the prongs come out from the bottom of the phone, rather than the top, meaning the user runs the risk of shocking themselves if they press the wrong button. This comes in handy when Bond has to trick an adversary into disabling himself, under the pretense of remotely unlocking his car.

Literature

• Clue: The book Midnight Phone Calls has a chapter titled "The Guest Who Couldn't Shoot Straight". While hunting an escaped rhinoceros, the six guests are armed with revolvers, two that only shoot to the left, two that only shoot to the right, and two that work normally. At the end, one of the first four revolvers is pointed directly at the rhino, but apparently hits one of the other guests instead. (As usual, it turns out the "victim" isn't really dead - the bullet hit his own revolver's handle, and he fainted from fear.)
• In the Discworld, the city Watch was at the end of the supply and priority chain for just about everything, and tended to be issued with crossbows so defective that they fired backwards. This ended when Captain Carrot raided the city armoury so as to be able to control an obvious source of weaponry and deny it to rioters, then to issue his City Militia with reliable kit. Later on, Sam Vimes uses his new wealth as Duke of Ankh to ensure Watchmen get the best sidearms available.
• The French Cover of Hugh Laurie's The Gun Seller shows an automatic pistol with the barrel clearly pointing backwards.
• In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Ron's wand is damaged and becomes prone to firing spells through the wrong end, the one pointing towards the spellcaster... which is good news when Professor Lockhart steals it and tries to use it to erase Ron's and Harry's memories...
• The Lovejoy novel The Judas Pair featured a pair of duelling pistols designed to fire backwards. The owner would challenge someone to a duel and let them fire first. His opponent would end up shooting himself in the face. This story was also made into an episode of the Lovejoy TV series.
• Played with in Starworld, where a pistol has been Booby Trapped to explode when fired. The pistol belonged to Thurgood-Smyth, who realised an underling suspected him of treason, so he has the weapon prepared in advance, knowing the underling couldn't resist confronting him directly with his own weapon. The only problem was putting some distance between them so he wouldn't be killed also.

Live-Action TV

• Happened in The Benny Hill Show episode "The B-Team", a skit that spoofed The A-Team. Murdock chooses to make use of an outdoor latrine just when B.A fires an M72 LAW at the villains; B.A. is holding the rocket launcher the wrong way round and blows up the latrine instead. Murdock staggers out thinking it was something he ate.
• In Class (2016), the displacement gun is an alien weapon that fires both forwards and backwards, thus killing its wielder as well as its target. It was intentionally designed as a suicide weapon, as it's intended exclusively for use against Shadow-Kin: otherworldly entities that exist inside other beings' shadows, hence can only be killed if the opponent whose shadow they are inhabiting is simultaneously annihilated.
• Doctor Who
  • In "The Time of the Doctor", the Doctor convinces the wooden Cyberman that he has converted its weapon into one of these. When the Cyberman reverses his gun, it winds up shooting itself in the chest.
  • In "Fugitive of the Judoon", the Doctor brings along a laser rifle for her confrontation with Gat, betting that Gat will attempt to execute her with that rifle. The rifle has been recalibrated to vapourize the one who fires it. She did urge Gat repeatedly not to fire it, but left out why.
• A Farscape episode in which Crichton imagines himself in a Looney Tunes cartoon has him pulling this trick by sliding the sight forwards on D'Argo's shotgun. An angry D'Argo swaps the barrel round, only to shoot himself a second time. Exactly like Wile E Coyote below.
• Father Brown: In "The Lair of the Libertines", one Victim of the Week is killed when the killer removes the safety catch from his pistol. This causes the firing pin to shoot out backwards when he fires the pistol, hitting him between the eyes.
• The Goodies. In "The Movies", Graham Garden is making The Western. He kicks open a door holding revolvers Guns Akimbo, only for the door to slam back in his face. When he opens the door again, both barrels are bent upwards, causing debris to rain down from the ceiling when he fires.
• In Henry Danger episode "The Time Jerker", Schwoz created a typical laser gun they use, but with a scope on top that actually shoots the shooter. He tricked Henry into using it, but in this case, it was just a painful, but harmless result.
• Inspector George Gently: At the end of "Son of a Gun", the skinhead leader Jonjo Burden is blinded when the Sten gun he is aiming at Gently backfires. It turns out the boy he was forcing into modifying it hadn't finished boring out the barrel.
• In a season 3 episode of the Canadian series The Listener, this turns out to be the payoff for the villain's Evil Plan to wreak revenge on the guy who molested his daughter — he set up a scenario where he knew the guy would get the gun from him, but the gun was rigged to shoot the chamber backwards right into his head. This also allows him to rationalize the guy's death with his personal vow against killing others; technically he didn't pull the trigger.
• The Man from U.N.C.L.E. had in one episode a pistol which fired backwards AND forwards, so that the assassin would take out her target and at the same time inadvertently silence herself for good.
• Happens to Kenny in My Name Is Earl, only with mace, while trying to spray Earl with it. Earl helps take the sting out of his eyes afterwards.
  Earl: When you steal a lot of purses, you learn a thing or two about mace.
• The bent-barrel version of this trope was tested—and confirmed—on MythBusters.
• A completely accidental version occurs in an episode of NUMB3RS due to a design flaw in an automatic weapon: in an attempt to keep the weapon's weight down so it would be easier to carry, the designer made the barrel wall too thin to withstand the heat and pressure buildup that comes from continuous firing, causing the barrel to explode if the gun is in operation for too long. The owner of one of said guns learns this the hard way, taking a piece of shrapnel in the neck.
• The Prisoner (1967): In the zany spy-spoof episode "The Girl Who Was Death", Number 6 modifies some rifles so that they'll fire backwards before some guards arrive and attempt to shoot him with them. He also modifies German "potato-masher" grenades so that the charges are in the handles instead of the heads.
• Red Dwarf: In "The Inquisitor", Kryten and Lister steal the Inquisitor's gauntlet and Kryten reprograms it. When the Inquisitor reacquires it and fires it at Lister, it fires backwards and removes the Inquisitor from history.
• One episode of Running Man had Yoo Jae-suk, acting as Yoomes Bond, searching for an apprentice. He ends up taking in Lee Kwang-soo, whose medical history has a prominent case of Chronic Backstabbing Disorder. Nonetheless, the two working together were able to eliminate the other players with squirt guns until they were the last ones left, whereupon Jae-suk presents Kwang-soo with one last test by handing him a squirt gun and challenging him to either shoot him and take the prize for himself, or put the gun down and they can split it. It becomes a Secret Test of Character, as the gun Jae-suk hands over is a trick gun that fires backwards. Kwang-soo fails the test and pulls the trigger only to shoot himself in the face, to Jae-suk's disappointment but not to his surprise.
• In a Russ Abbot sketch parodying The Godfather, the Oddfather explains that if he suspects someone's trying to kill him, he leaves a backwards-firing gun on the table, so the would-be assassin snatches it up, aims it at him, and shoots themselves. The henchman he's explaining this to grabs the nearest gun, shouts "I'm smarter than da rest! Say goodbye, Oddfather!", points it at himself, and pulls the trigger. Turns out it wasn't a backward-firing gun after all.
• "Wine, Women and War", the second pilot for The Six Million Dollar Man has Steve Austin crimp the barrel of a mook's gun closed with his bionic fingers. The mook doesn't notice this and, despite Austin warning him not to fire, he shoots and nails himself (though it's unclear whether he actually shoots himself or gets knocked out by backfire).
• Star Trek: Voyager: In "Worst Case Scenario", Seska has programmed the holodeck to become a Deadly Game involving the Voyager crew; when Holodeck-Janeway fires her compression phaser rifle at Seska, it disintegrates Janeway. Later Seska forces Tuvok to Put Down Your Gun and Step Away, but the same thing happens to her as Tuvok sabotaged his rifle before handing it over.
• The Wild Wild West:
  • In the season 2 episode "The Night of the Tottering Tontine", the killer substitutes such a gun for the regular revolver of one of his intended victims, one Harry Stimson. Since Stimson was a Trigger-Happy Sociopath who enjoyed shooting up saloons for fun... cue him taking the substituted gun and offing himself instead.
  • In another season 2 episode, "The Night of the Bogus Bandits", Miguelito Loveless hands James West such a pistol, but he sees through the ruse. Said gun pulls a Chekhov at the end of the episode, when Loveless pulls a gun on a hostage, only for West to remind him that there were two identical-looking guns in the bag, only one of which shot forwards.

Radio

• In the BBC radio drama Batman: The Lazarus Syndrome, Ra's al Ghul accidentally shoots himself when he grabs a gun from Batman's trophy room, not realising that it is a booby-trapped weapon rigged to fire backwards.

Tabletop Games

• The classic Dungeons & Dragons module Expedition to the Barrier Peaks has a super-science pistol that relies on a player to interpret it being held like a normal gun (something the characters should never have seen before) to apply this effect. It doesn't actually fire backwards — it's designed to fire at what it's aimed at, it's just designed to fool the player using meta-game knowledge instead of figuring out the correct way to hold it.
• Grimtooth's Traps Too contains a reverse-firing "Double Crossbow" as a loot trap.
• One Paranoia mission includes an experimental weapon that needs to be field-tested. When activated, it explodes. This is intentional. The weapon is called the "Traitor Killer"; it's assumed that there'll be a traitor on the team, and that they'll volunteer in hopes of not being targeted.

Video Games

• Cobra Triangle: One of the two forms of the top of the Fire power-up chain fires one bullet from the fore, one from the aft, and one each from starboard and port.
• Duck Game has one inspired by the Suicide Gun image manipulation. Naturally, using it kills its user and it's often hard to tell from the normal revolver due to the small size of the handle and trigger. However, if you fire it while standing, and slide just as you pull the trigger, the bullet safely flies over your head. Once you master this trick, it becomes a remarkably effective weapon.
• The Gun that can Kill the Past in Enter the Gungeon.
• The site Epic Mafia, centered around an online version of the parlor game Mafia, has the Fabricator role. While Village-aligned roles such as the Gunsmith, Blacksmith, and Santa can secretly give others gifts every night, this Evil Counterpart can create fake versions of items. This includes a fake gun which backfires and kills the user.
• The "Cursed Halo" mod for Halo: Combat Evolved features two versions of this.
  • First, the M6C Magnum is replaced by a throwing magnum, which is backwards-facing and can actually shoot its holder, but the secondary fire will instead throw it and deal normal pistol damage on impact.
  • The rocket launcher also fires backward, though it doesn't hit the player due to the silos sitting on the player's shoulder.
• Plants vs. Zombies:
  • The Split Pea has two heads, with its rear head firing peas backwards at twice the rate that its front head does.
  • In the Vasebreaker mode, some of the vases contain Repeaters which inexplicably face the wrong way, forcing you to place them behind the zombies.
• One of the Tales of Monkey Island chapters has Guybrush insert a glass tube in the shape of the letter 'U' into an antagonist's gun, causing it to fire backwards.
• In War Thunder, damage to the breach of the tank's cannon can cause it to misfire. Attempting to fire with a damaged breach has a fairly high chance of causing the shell to explode in the breach, instantly killing the crew.

Web Original

• In one episode of Bastard Operator from Hell, we find out that the cattle prods have two settings. "Stir Fry" operates normally, while "Stun" causes the high voltage to fry the person brandishing the device. This is then used by the Bastard when he suggests the Boss use the cattle prod to stun the PFY.
• One early digression in the podcast Worst Foot Forward has the hosts and guest speculate on whether making guns that randomly shot the user as well would reduce gun violence.

Western Animation

• Ben 10: Omniverse: In "An American Benwolf in London", a robot grabs Rook's gun off him and points it at him. Rook says that he knows something about the weapon that the robot does not. As the robot fires and blows a hole in its own chest, Rook says "You're holding it backwards".
• Dennis and Gnasher: In "Yard Sale", Walter picks up Dennis's squirt gun and attempts to shoot Dennis with it, only for it to spray him in the face as Dennis says it backfires. He then turns the gun around and attempts to shoot Dennis again, only to soaked again as the water comes out the barrel and Dennis adds "Sometimes".
• Used at least twice in Futurama:
  • In the episode "Assie Come Home" when making a delivery, Leela has Bender bend the barrels of all the guns, leading to all the gang members killing themselves.
  • A non-lethal example occurs with a megaphone in "The Day The Earth Stood Stupid", Fry shouting uselessly into the conical end and getting blasted with an amplified pigeon noise as the bird inspects the microphone end.^note Presumably, Fry misunderstood the stereotypical "backwards pistol grip" (common to real and cartoon megaphones) as a forwards pistol grip.
• Occurs in numerous Looney Tunes shorts.
  • Apparently you can make any gun fire backwards if you stick your finger in the barrel. (As the MythBusters proved, this doesn't work in real life.)
  • In one notable example, Bugs Bunny causes Wile E. Coyote to shoot himself, several times, simply by moving the sight to the other end, or removing it completely so he can't tell which end is which.
  • And in "Hillbilly Hare", he does it by turning the barrel of a long rifle round after the trigger has been pulled.
  • "Pre-Hysterical Hare" has a Prehistoric Bugs do this with the first gun, right after inventing the thing, no less. After loading it and giving it to Elmer Fuddstone, Bugs switches the stock around right before Elmer tries to shoot him with it.
• Men in Black: The Series: When facing off against an escaped alien prisoner in "The Take No Prisoners Syndrome", J grabs an unfamiliar alien weapon from the armory and threatens him with it. The Bug sneeringly informs J that he's grabbed a "Sonar Tube" and is holding it backwards. J turns it around, looking at the brace-like structure on the end he's pointing at himself and the open barrel-like end pointed at the Bug, then puts back the way he had it, points it back at the Bug, and pulls the trigger. A small nozzle promptly pops up and aims a targeting laser at J's forehead, forcing him to jerk the blaster up before it nearly takes his head off.
• In one episode of The Simpsons, Mr. Burns moves the power plant to India. When one of Moe's patrons comments that the bar is being powered by imported electricity, Moe sees no problem and points out other imported stuff. When he's asked if he has anything made in America, he shows his shotgun and tries to shoot, causing it to backfire.

Real Life

• A poorly-made, incorrectly assembled or worn-out firearm or excessively powerful cartridge loads can cause the bolt, part of the breech or — in the case of semi-automatic pistols — the slide to be blown back into the user's face. The Reliably Unreliable Guns page has a couple of examples.
  • The most notable version is probably the Ross Rifle, a Canadian-designed and built substitute for the excellent Lee-Enfield during World War I. While a fine design, just as powerful and slightly more accurate, it could be disassembled and then reassembled with the bolt head turned in the wrong direction, chambering and firing a round without the bolt securely locked to the receiver, resulting in possible Eye Scream.
  • When the Beretta M9 was the standard US military handgun, the US Navy SEALs were among the only members of the US military to use a 9mm pistol that wasn't it, partly because of a combination of defects that caused the same sort of issue as the Ross rifle above — poorly heat-treated slides and incorrectly forged locking blocks in early batches were giving out five times earlier than they should have, and this was made worse when a bad batch of horrifically overcharged ammunition was thrown into the mix. In any case, whether you had a weakened slide that broke in half or a cracked locking block shattering to pieces, or if a faulty cartridge exploded, the slide (or the back half of it) would fly off and hit the SEAL firing it in the face during training, with at least one SEAL reportedly having lost his eye from it. As the quote went, "you ain't a SEAL until you've eaten Italian steel".
    • Beretta eventually fixed the problem with the M9 (upgrading the base platform into the Beretta 92FS) and the only reason the SEALs encountered the problem was because they train more on sidearms in a month than most regular servicemen do in their entire careers. However, the damage was already done to Beretta's reputation, and for the next three decades the US military, almost like clockwork every three or four years, propped up programs to either select a new standard sidearm (when they just wanted to get rid of the Beretta) or adopt a secondary special-purpose .45 ACP sidearm whose "special purpose" would be to replace the Beretta (when they were feeling bold enough to try going back to the M1911); by the time of the last, successful attempt in the Modular Handgun System, Beretta didn't even bother offering further upgrades of the M9 because it would have been rejected on principle.
• In World War I there were attempts made to mount large caliber cannons onto the flimsy biplanes of the day to shoot down zeppelins, and one method used to mitigate the substantial recoil was to simply weld a second cannon facing backwards to the back of the forward firing cannon, and firing both guns at the same time, the rear one loaded with chain or other such material to cancel out the recoil of the forward firing gun. This wasn't very successful against high-flying zeppelins, but U-boats became the primary victims of recoilless artillery, especially when patrolling flying boats equipped with Davis Guns could simply point the guns straight down and hit the submarines before they could dive.
• Recoilless rifles were adopted after World War I to combat tanks. Instead of the weapon itself taking the hit from the cartridge being fired, a lot of the gas is vented from the back. The same principle is used by rocket launchers like the bazooka and RPG-7. Because the blast isn't contained, the weapon itself is much lighter, allowing small vehicles and individual soldiers to carry a weapon that can penetrate tank armor. The backwards firing part comes in when you consider that those same gasses that aren't stopped by the weapon can injur and even kill anybody some feet behind it. This also prevents them from being fired indoors, as nearby walls would bounce the gasses back to the shooter.
  • During the Korean War, a number of U.S.-built recoilless rifles were captured by Chinese troops, who attempted to use them without being aware of how they operated. They didn't do it twice.
  • The same thing happened to the Finns in World War II when they were supplied with Panzerfausts by Germany - though the weapon did have a warning printed on it, it was naturally written in German, resulting in some Finnish soldiers bracing the weapon on their shoulder like a rifle and killing themselves with the backblast.
• Water guns have been made so that there's a rotating exit on the top allowing guns to squirt in any direction and forward at the same time.
• There is a possibly photoshopped image of a backwards revolver circling the Internet.
  • But there is in fact a real toy version of a backwards revolver.
• Extra Credits has used it a few times as one of its B-Roll Rebus-esque images.
• Backwards-firing Combat Cutlery. "It is difficult to imagine a social gathering where it is appropriate to shoot off your own elbows." Needless to say, it seems that the utensils have to be turned around before the triggers can be pulled.
• One 'dirty trick' of covert warfare is to arrange for your enemy to get hold of small-arms cartridges loaded with C4 (or nitroglycerin) instead of regular gunpowder.
• Squibbed guns are a bad thing. A squib occurs when a foreign object gets really stuck down a gun barrel or if a projectile failed to leave during the firing cycle. Attempting to fire a squibbed gun will usually result in a burst barrel or worse, a piece of rifle bolt (or a piece of shattered slide from a pistol) flying into the user's face.

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