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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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  • 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...)

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