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alt title(s): The Dramatic Gun Cock What a wonder is a gun! What a versatile invention! First of all, when you've a gun... (loud click) ...everybody pays attention.
—From Assassins , by Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman
[Loud gun cock] Now doesn't that just torque your jaws? I love that. You know like in the movies just as the good guy is about to kill the bad guy, he cocks his gun. Now why didn't he have it cocked? Because that sound is scary. It's cool, isn't it? — Phone Booth
The dramatic gun cock is usually employed when a character is up to some interrogation work while holding a gun to someone's head. The subject of the investigation is invited to divulge some critical information. The subject refuses or spouts an insult.
Here comes the dramatic gun cock. The interrogator angrily pulls back the hammer of the revolver or chambers a round on the automatic, or for a really big noise, pumps the shotgun, then resumes pointing the gun to the subject's head.
Usually this is enough to thoroughly spook the subject into full disclosure.
The dramatic gun cock may be accompanied by a Pistol Whipping.
With or without a Pistol Whipping, this is visually dramatic but dangerous and stupid, and people occasionally shoot one another by accident when attempting to imitate this.
By the way, most weapons used by professionals are carried in ready to fire condition, and so pumping them dramatically would eject an unfired round. One of the few series to depict this behavior is Firefly, in the episode "Jaynestown". (An exception to this behaviour is with double-action revolvers, which can be fired without manually cocking the hammer first, but making the trigger pull lighter.)
In other situations, the dramatic gun cock serves to announce a character's presence, or (especially when taking place off-camera) to indicate that the tables have turned in some way. This is a Click Hello, and often occurs in conjunction with a My Name Is Inigo Montoya moment.
There's honest debate amongst those who own shotguns for home defense: with a pump-action shotgun, should you leave the chamber empty and cock it when you find the would-be miscreant, using the distinctive sound of a pump-action as a means of scaring the crap (sometimes literally) out of him, or do you chamber a round beforehand so you can shoot first if he's armed?
This troper is genuinly terriffied that all of the contributers to this page seem to think that the best way to carry a weapon is with a round up the spout and the safety off. Presumably these are NOT the same contributers that mock accidental discharges on another page...
Examples:
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- Used by a hostage taker in the premiere of Big O, to get across exactly how imperative it is that Roger Smith hand the phone over to the hostage's father. It works.
Comic Books
- In Nightwing: Year One, Nightwing stops a group of carjackers, one of whom decides to be cool. He then mercilessly lampshades this by asking if the crook had seen that on TV, points out that he's just ejected a perfectly good round, and then continues to cock the gun until he's effectively disarmed. There's a reason they call him the Boy Wonder.
- Used in the (rather short) movie Phone Booth with the twist of the gun (a sniper rifle) being a good deal away from the protagonist and the sound being delivered by telephone. He then goes on to discuss this trope, its apparent flaw, and its psychological justification. He also perpetrates the mistake of cocking his gun twice without firing a round in between (presumably ejecting a live round).
- Considering the intent was to scare the protagonist straight, ejecting a live round is entirely justifiable.
- A fairly egregious example comes from the Stargate movie. During the scene where the commando team is investigating the temple, they cock their guns absolutely every time they hear a noise. Considering this is maybe a ten man team and there are maybe twenty gun-cocks per startling noise, this may be the result of a trigger-happy foley artist.
- In Lethal Weapon 3 the Dramatic Gun Cock is used for interrogation. One of the good guys wants to know where a submachine gun is coming from, and to extract this information from a baddie he proceeds to cock said submachine gun and point it at his head. In the same movie, later on, the two main characters are about to start shooting up the baddies' main hideout. They get their weapons, ready themselves... only to hear a Dramatic Gun Cock from behind them. They start to raise their hands, but it turns out it's another good guy (a good girl, actually) who's come to help them and is just scaring them for fun.
- Used at least twice in The Boondock Saints; the McManus brothers hold their pistols to the back of their victim's head, and recite their family prayer before firing, such that the prayer ends like this: "In nomine patris, et filii..." CLICK "...et spiritus sancti." BLAM.
- Kinda funny considering these are Beretta 92's. Considering they always do this after shooting a room full of baddies, they would need to decock the weapons before cocking them.
- Taken to the extreme by Magneto in the X Men movie, when, after yanking all the cops' guns out of their hands and pointing them at their owners' heads, he cocks every one at once.
- Sarah Connor does this several times in succession in Terminator 2, blasting the T-1000 with a SWAT-issue shotgun and interjecting each shot with a forceful, one-armed pump.
- Hell lets not forget the T-800 itself in the same film dramatically cocking his shotgun one-handed by swirling the gun 360 degrees around on his finger, by the firing guard.
- This can't be done with any real-world gun (the shotgun in question was custom-altered for the movie), and the only purpose of doing so would be to allow the gun to be shot one-handed (likely breaking any human arm with the recoil), but damned if it wasn't awesome.
- The clack-clack seems to happen every time the villains brandish their assault weapons at Stallone and company in Cliffhanger (and countless other action movies as well).
- Subverted in Silence Of The Lambs. The villain's tendency to cock his revolver is what gets him killed by Clarice Starling in the end, after it gives him away in complete darkness.
- In Scary Movie III on of the characters dramatically cocks... a shovel. A shell falls out.
- Subverted in Snatch, where one of the robbers of a betting parlor wastes rounds in the gun doing so. And he doesn't even get to use it and has it stolen from him. And even worse, it's the only real gun they had.
- The Rock. "Your best? Losers always whine about their best. Winners go home and fuck the prom queen!" "Carla was the prom queen..." "Really?" *clock.* "Really."
- In Tony Scott's deplorable Domino, a dramatic conversation between Ed (Mickey Rourke) and Choco (Edward Ramirez) results in Choco cocking his revolver not once, but TWICE, despite the tension level never dropping to a point where the gun is ever, well, un-cocked.
- In Lola Rennt, it's dramatically releasing the safety (and thus technically another trope, but used more in this way) that signifies that the titular heroine means Serious Business. Twice.
- Also parodied in Evil Dead 2: Dead by Dawn, where Ash cocks a type of gun that can't be cocked (if this troper is to trust the knowledge of another viewer who knows more about guns).
- In Sneakers, during Martin's escape near the end, one thug carries a shotgun which he grabs and pumps as soon as he gets it. But he never fires a round, and yet when he finally finds Martin, he pumps the shotgun at him again. Normally this wouldn't be very obvious if you weren't paying attention, but in this case, you can hear the loud CLUNK of the unfired shell hitting the floor.
- The second Pirates Of The Caribbean when Elizabeth threatens Cutler Beckett, she makes a point of pulling the hammer back on her pistol so that he'll know she means business.
- In the Chuck Norris action thriller Code of Silence, two thugs try and rob a bar. Only when the hear a chorus of gun cocks do they realize it's a bar where off-duty cops hang out.
- The record for most Dramatic Gun Cocks executed by a single character, in a single scene, certainly belongs to The Mask, wherein the title character responds to the bad guy's show of force... with his own - at least 28 weapons pulled from behind his back.
- In The Curious Case of Sid Finch, the title character (a skilled human parrot, among other talents) tries to scare a burglar by imitating the sound of a taxicab. He later wishes he had thought to make the sound of a rifle bolt being drawn back.
- Backfires pretty badly on the protagonist of Richard K. Morgan's Market Forces. Holding some thugs at bay with a shotgun, he pumps it in attempt to intimidate them... and the gun, having been previously damaged, conspicuously fails to chamber another round, thus rendering him visibly defenseless.
- CSI Miami built a whole subplot out of this when someone pointed a gun at the back of Calleigh Duquesne's head and cocked it. She spent the rest of the episode listening to gun-cocks until she was able to successfully identify the type of weapon pointed at her.
- One storyline on Miami Vice has Crockett suffering partial amnesia. He forgets he's really a cop and falls into his undercover persona of a facilitator of drug deals. While in this state he shoots his partner Tubbs, apparently killing him. Of course Tubbs turns out to have been wearing a Bulletproof Vest. After that Crockett's memory begins to return. Guilt-ridden, he makes his way to the police station. He walks into the squadroom and stops. His fellow officers, believing him to have turned rogue, draw and cock their weapons in succession. CLICK. CLICK. CLICK. CLICK.
- Used to excess in Firefly; in fact, Jayne seems to speak almost entirely in dramatic gun cocks.
- Mal also seems fond of doing it at times, either to make a point (such as in the "Big Damn Heroes" scene in "Safe") or as a way of saying "Cut the bullshit" if someone is trying to con him. It's particularly noticeable in his interactions with Saffron.
- Notably played for laughs when Wash cocks a tiny pistol rather dramatically in "War Stories."
- Speaking of "Jaynestown", anyone notice the DGC sound when 'Stitch' Hessian points his shotgun at Mal's face? Seeing as Stitch doesn't pump the action (he's holding the shotgun one-handed) and that model doesn't have an exposed hammer, what exactly is creating the cocking sound?
- Target lock? Weapon powering up? Futuristic saftey? Its futuretech, so you can probably make up your own answer.
- The interrogation aspect is inverted in The Movie, where Mal is trying to talk down River as she has a pistol pointed at him, while looking away at a computer terminal. He tells her that he considers her a person, and not a weapon, and if she disagrees, she'd best shoot him now.... *hammer click* ....or they can keep talking.
- Inverted in The Sarah Connor Chronicles, where John has to quietly and carefully pump a shotgun while Cromartie is walking around his house. The not-so-dramatic noise nearly reveals to Cromartie where John is hiding.
- Locke uses the gun cock to get Ben to reveal information in the Lost episode "Confirmed Dead." Kate uses it in "Not in Portland" to get Aldo to tell her Karl's whereabouts.
- Obligatory Star Trek reference — in "A Piece of the Action," when a gangster sneaks up behind Kirk and Spock, Kirk is able to recognize the sound of a Thompson machine gun being cocked. Ah, Starfleet training, you can't beat it.
- on Angel when the titular character is about to shoot Faith point-blank with a shotgun, he delivers his little speech, then dramatically pumps the shotgun. Then he does it again. And again. Only once all of the shells have been ejected does Faith kick it away and resume fisticuffs.
- From What It's Like Being Alone:
"What happened to my booze? Did I black out and join AA? [ Dramatic Gun Cock] Better unjoin it."
- Blatantly overused in Heroes, where you know someone is going to cock their gun only after pointing it at someone for ten seconds. The only exception is Noah Bennet.
- While not a firearm, Stargate SG-1's version of the Dramatic Gun Cock would be the staff weapon's distinctive 'Bzzzt' sound when it is armed, as well as showing arcs of energy along the tip of the weapon. The Goa'uld and their Jaffa love doing this to prisoners before executing them.
Real Life
- Almost all military units, the world over, keep a round chambered at all times while in the field. The only exception are peace-keeping forces, because the sight and sound of an entire squad cocking their weapons is usually enough to scare any would-be troublemakers back into line without the force having to resort to violence.
- It's been said that if you must keep a gun in the house, a pump-action shotgun is a good choice for a number of reasons. First, the small pellets are unlikely to go though walls and reduces the chance of friendly fire, and secondly, the sound of loading a round in the chamber is VERY distinctive and lets the intruder know what is pointing at them.
- On this troper's first day of firearms training with the RAF, it was EXPLICITLY drilled into him that the weapon should be made-safe in all situations that do not involve pointing at a live fire target. This meant near continuous rattling of cock-safetyoff-safetyon-clearchamber-easespring every time someone so much as touched a weapon. Even this level of gun safety paranoia was not enough to prevent the occassional accidental discharge by someone who thought they were holding a 'safe' weapon...
(Squaddie friends tell the story of how they would be forever be half-cocking their 'gats' and then dry-firing at each other; Helluva funny right up to the moment one of them blew his best mate's brains all over the tarmac...)
Tabletop Games
- Role-playing example: In GURPS Discworld Also, the type of repeating crossbow used in the swashbuckling seaports of the Brown Islands makes a distinctive "ka-chunk" sound when a bolt is released from the magazine. "Some users regard this as an essential feature."
- Spending a shot to do this with a shotgun (the "KA-CHINK!" rule) in Feng Shui gets you an extra damage point on your next attack with it.
Video Games
- Except for the sniper rifles, every time you switch guns in Counter Strike, your character automatically cocks the gun as soon as you select one.
- Overplayed in Metal Gear Solid 2. In an attempt to find the location of the C4 bombs along the complex, Raiden interrogates Fat Man. As Fat Man pushes a remote, Raiden cocks his gun and demands an explanation. He does this at least twice more.
- Subverted in a Metal Gear Solid 3 cut scene. Before single-handedly taking out a KGB squad, Ocelot does a dramatic gun cock. Only when he reloads his pistol, it jams, giving Snake an opportunity to disarm him. Snake then points out that manually ejecting the first round was a stupid idea.
- Perhaps evident in Metal Gear Solid 4. In both the vanilla game and Metal Gear Online, whenever Snake (or any other player) reloads a gun, they cock the gun to chamber a round. Okay, this is realistic. However, doing so ejects another round. So apparently every clip has one extra bullet just for dramatic purposes?
- This only happens if the gun is empty. Since quite a few guns also have another means to "ready" them after reloading aside from cocking, the cocking effectively is for dramatic purposes.
- From the Team Fortress 2 "Meet the Team" video "Meet the Spy", the soldier dramatically cocks his shotgun, while claiming that the blu spy was the red spy all along.
- Can also happen with Energy Weapons, such as Sergeant Schlock's Plasgun and its Ommminous Hummmm. "I like the soothing sounds I get from this one."
- Such as in the climax of Ghostbusters. Having reached the Big Bad, the team confidently stride up to her seat of power and go through their proton packs' startup sequence slowly and methodically, which includes two versions of the gun cock: the simultaneous, distinctive whine of the particle throwers as they're powered on, and the mechanical extension of the wands at their business end.
Western Animation
- Parodied (isn't everything?) in an episode of The Simpsons, where a hunter says something dramatic, and pumps his shotgun, visibly expelling a shell. Cletus the Yokel tries to copy him, and then he and the hunter start bickering about whether his comment added anything, and they keep expelling shells at the end of each sentence!
Web Animation
Web Original
- Parodied in this video
- Justified in Void Dogs, with Cicada's GSMR. The gun fires self-propelled rocket rounds so there's no reason for it to cock, but it has a button that makes ominous, attention-grabbing noises so she can do this and Click Hello.
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