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".
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?
Examples:
- 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 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.
- 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."
- 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.
- 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.
- Videogame example: 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.
- 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."
- 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.
- 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?
- 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 *click* ....or they can keep talking.
- In the comic book 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 at least twice in the movie 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.
- 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.
- 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!
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 repeatedly by swirling the gun 360 degrees around on his finger, by the firing guard.
- 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.
- 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.
- Parodied in this video
- 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).
- 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.
- 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.
- 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).
