Gun Accessories

Who needs a close-range backup weapon? Your sniper scope has a reflex sight for that.

Gun Salesman: You'll probably want the accessory kit: Holster. Bandolier. Silencer. Loudener. Speed-cocker. Aaand [pulls out attachment much larger than the gun itself] this one's for shooting down police helicopters.
Homer: Oh, I don't need anything like that. Yet...

— The Simpsons, "The Cartridge Family"

There are guns, but when your gun isn't cool enough by itself, what do you do? Why, you attach a ton of junk to it, of course! Tacticool.

What sort of toys can you attach to a gun? Take a gander at the Useful Notes page.

As well as all that, you might have non-slip coated surfaces on the weapon to make it easier to handle, as well as camo; most weapons with synthetic furnishings come in a single colour, so additions might be anything from boot polish to actual paint or even bits of foliage. There's also the option of changing the grips for ones more ergonomic than the standard, enlarging or otherwise altering the various levers and controls, changing the trigger and trigger guard, replacing synthetic furnishings with wood or vice versa, or adding tasteless plated finishes and engraving.

Often, more distinctly fictional devices are present, like X-ray scanners, heartbeat monitors, or pointless glowing whatsits. A classic is a visible ammo counter, popularized by Aliens and often used by video games to provide a Diegetic Interface. A recent trend in video games is to depict accessory parts as quick-swappable; any potential issues with having to re-zero scopes are glossed over, due to Rule of Cool and Rule of Fun.

See also IKEA Weaponry, Scaramanga Special, Swiss-Army Gun, and Alternate Fire. Often a Sub-Trope of Gun Porn. For accessories for guns you're supposed to wear, see Badass Bandolier. Note that with regard to video games, the important thing is that there are physical additions to the weapon; just being able to boost abstract stats to power up weapons isn't this trope, that would be Socketed Equipment. If the accessory itself is another kind of weapon, you may have a Mix-and-Match Weapon, Combo Rifle, or Bifurcated Weapon on your hands. If the accessory in question is a gunlight, expect batteries to never be an issue.

Compare with Secondary Fire, which is a different kind of attack from the same gun that you can toggle between rather than an add-on modification.

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These subpages are all kitted out:

• Video Games

This page mounts the following accessories:

Anime/Manga

• Lampshaded in the 2010 OVA of Cat Shit One, where Packy chastises Bota about putting so much unnecessary stuff on his rifle, remarking that the extra weight will only serve to slow him down. Even Bota half admits that he does it for Rule of Cool purposes, but is later vindicated when his oversized scope helps block a terrorist's sword swing.
• In Full Metal Panic! anime adaptation, Mithril operators use Cornershot attachments on their rifles during the hostage crisis under the Yangtze River.

Comic Books

• In one strip of the Swedish comic Hälge, the local though-guy Uffe decided that a silencer was too sissy, so he attached an amplifier instead. Edwin who was next to him was visibly shaken by the thing.
• Parodied in Marvel's What The—? comics with The Pulverizer, as seen here.◊

Card Games

• The Good, the Bad & the Munchkin has the Seven-Gun, which is a Six-Gun with a tiny single-shot pistol attached to the barrel. The right array of enhancement cards can turn it into My Grandpappy's Steam-Powered Seven-Gun With Unlimited Ammo.
  • The basic Seven-Gun may actually be loosely based on a Real Life gun, the LeMat revolver.

Fanfiction

• Plan 7 of 9 from Outer Space by Odon. Captain Proton contacts a virtual gunshop and is offered a selection of lethal weaponry culminating in the BFG-USBFOMGROFLMFAOWTFUBARSNAFUA1 Individual Integrated Modular Combat Assault Weapon. The number of accessories that can be attached to its top, side, and bottom-mounted accessory rails is a very Long List.

Film

• In The Naked Gun 2 1/2, Nordberg ducks behind a corner, hefts his pistol and adds an accessory. Then another. Then another. Eventually he's sitting in a full-size antiaircraft gun.
• Another parody was in Beverly Hills Cop III, which featured an advert for the "Annihilator 2000," a comically over-featured weapon including such extras as a phone, fax machine, CD player and microwave oven (marketed as "the weapon for the modern survivalist" and said several celebrities owned it, like Stallone). Thankfully, once he figured out which switch did what, the integral heavy machine gun and rocket launcher ended up being helpful.
• In The Terminator, Arnold Schwarzenegger used an AMT Hardballer Longslide equipped with a very early "Laserlock" sight; the prop actually worked, though it ran off a battery pack taped to his back and was triggered using a switch in his other hand, with each connected to the battery by cords going up both of Arnold's sleeves.
• Robocop's gun was a Beretta 93R fitted with an enormous ported compensator designed to produce a huge horizontal muzzle flash. The compensator was necessary, because otherwise the gun would have looked pitifully small on the Robocop suit's hands (giving Robo a Desert Eagle (which was his sidearm on the original script) was discarded because of this).
• In Equilibrium, the Clerics use similar weapons; these are converted Beretta 92s with fullauto drop-in sears, M16-style fire selectors and a variety of additional extras, including self-balancing magazines with rounded bases, and magazines with integral blade-things in the base for clubbing people with.
  • The magazine blade-things are reminiscent of a real feature on flintlock pistols in the days of Wooden Ships and Iron Men: Nails in the butt of the pistol that could be used to make it more effective as an improvised club once the one shot had been fired.
• In The Living Daylights, Dalton uses a Walther WA2000 equipped with a rather large night vision scope and his own hand-loaded ammunition.
  • In the same movie, arms dealer Whitaker shows off a collection of firearms with silly Hollywood embellishments such as mini-missile launchers, and in the final confrontation pulls out a Colt Commando carbine fitted with a transparent gun shield.
• Eraser featured a scientifically ridiculous railgun with a matching scope; a special X-ray sight that could somehow look through concrete and still see the target's beating heart.
• Aliens popularized guns with built-in ammo counters; the Pulse Rifles used a very 80s system with simple 7-bar LED displays.
  • Moonwalker featured weapons with the same feature (and oversized attached flashlights) issued to soldiers of the overacting drug lord.
• Johnny Mnemonic has one scene that weirdly inverts this. Johnny takes an assault rifle, starts stripping parts off it and winds up with a heavy-looking handgun.
• Similarly inverted in Escape from New York, where the United States Police use M16's with their handguards removed, rather than with any additions. That was probably to give them an unfamiliar 'futuristic' look, rather than because the police liked scorching their hands.
• Hogarth Hughes duct-tapes a flashlight to his BB gun in The Iron Giant.

Literature

• Taken to an absurd level in Isekai Battle Royale, with loads of attachments and customizations like suppressors, foregrips and extended magazines scattered as drops around the world, to the point where there are more of them than there are actual guns to use them on.

Live-Action TV

• Sledge Hammer!'s own invention was a special accessory for revolvers. He calls it the "loudener."
• The Man from U.N.C.L.E. featured a series of custom Walther P38 pistols with various accessories including stocks, barrel extensions and scopes. They proved so popular that the guns received their own fan mail, and Megatron from Transformers was originally a toy version of the UNCLE gun.
• Watch enough Stargate SG-1, and you'll see all kinds of weapon accessories. The most commonly accessorized gun is the MP5, usually with a scope or ACOG of some sort (which is a bit optimistic regarding the MP-5's effective range), or a side-by-side magazine holder, but the P90 featured later got in on the act a few times, and light machine guns were rarely stock.
  • Alien technology was also used in some cases to accessorize the weapons, such as a Goa'uld combat-training device to turn them into non-lethal stun weapons and an attachment that makes them lethal to Kull Warriors.
• Flashpoint shows the police officers using various accessories on their (Weaver Rail) guns, especially tactical flashlights, foregrips, and ACOG scopes. Oddly enough, they almost never actually use the foregrips on their guns.
  • Ed spends one episode with what appears to be a Cornershot mount for his pistol which he uses as if it were a rifle rather than for its intended function.
• Sons of Guns now features the Docudrama in tacticool format.
• Star Trek: Deep Space Nine features the TR-116 rifle (a rare example of a gun that uses physical bullets rather than energy beams) which can be upgraded with an exographic targeting sensor and a micro-transporter, allowing it to be used to kill anyone from anywhere. Three Red Shirts learn that the hard way.
• In Ultraviolet (1998), the government vampire-killers have digital cameras attached to their weapons instead of gun-sights, even for close-range fights. There is a reason for this - Code V's don't show up on any form of analogue or digital camera equipment, so comparing what is visible on the camera's screen to what your eyes can see acts as an instant way of distinguishing undead from living.

Tabletop Games

• Shadowrun includes gas vents and shock pads, which provide recoil compensation, gyro stabilization, which offset recoil and movement penalties, sound suppressors, which are silencers for automatic weapons, bipods and tripods, which provide recoil compensation for heavy weapons, and smartgun systems, which tell you when your weapon is pointing at its target among other things. Although the ultimate in gun accessories has to be three choices for a propulsion system or the pilot upgrade.
• Call of Cthulhu supplement Terror from the Stars, section "Field Manual of the Theron Marks Society". The title Investigator group would tape flashlights on top of firearms so they could fire at targets in the dark. Eventually they designed custom mounts on the weapons to hold the flashlights.
• One such weapon is described in GURPS: Gun Fu owned by one "Bubba Lee Jones": Colt M4A1 carbine with twin-drum magazine, a reflex sight, night sight, a tactical light and a targeting laser. He calls her Dita.
  • He even gets bonuses for using Dita since he took the Tacticool perk.
• Games Workshop games:
  • Warhammer 40,000:
    • A common weapon upgrade for many factions is to turn a gun into a Combi-Weapon. Start with a standard Bolter - that is a semi-automatic weapon that fires armor-piercing, mass-reactive, explosive gyrojet rounds - then add a one-shot Flamer, Meltagun, or Plasma Gun to it. Chaos forces use Combi-Bolters, two Boltguns slapped together, as the archaic predecessor to the loyalist Storm Bolter.
    • Da Orks have a unit obsessed with this trope. Flash Gitz are rich greenskins who sink their fortunes into improving their Snazzguns by slapping all manner of additional barrels, ammo feeds, useless sights, clever gubbinz, know-wots, and other shooty bitz onto the weapons. In some editions of the game this is represented by purchased upgrades like "Shootier" (hit harder), "Blasta" (better at penetrating armor), and of course "More Dakka" (improved rate of fire).
    • One in every five Primaris Space Marines in an Intercessor Squad is able to upgrade their bolt rifle with an auxiliary grenade launcher. These underslung weapons boost the squad's ranged firepower by allowing the Intercessor to fire their frag and krak grenades at the same range as their bolt weapons.
  • The licensed RPGs Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader, and Deathwatch all have some stuff you can put on a gun. Dark Heresy starts out relatively harmless, with the obligatory silencer, scope and red-dot laserpointer. Rogue Trader and Deathwatch go a little further, supplying anti-grav gadgets that let you use a heavy full-auto rpg launcher while moving and, in the latter case, a chainsaw bayonet. Rogue Trader's expansion Into The Storm finally also featured Orks as playable characters, including Mekboyz and a few upgradez and kustom jobz they like to inflict on their guns in their quest for More Dakka. Among them is a loudener which enhances the noise made by guns to ridiculous levels and makes suppressive fire more effective.
  • In all editions of Necromunda, the underhive Trading Post has a number of different accessories that can be fitted to a variety of different weapons. These accessories range from mundane gunsights and silencers^note known as gunshrouds in 3rd Edition to more exotic accessories such as single-shot flamers, las-projectors (that extend the range of laser weapons) and suspensors (hydraulic or anti-grav accessories that make it easier to carry heavy and unwieldy weapons.

Toys

• NERF N-Strike blasters have Tactical Rails for you to pimp out customize to your heart's content with. Among the numerous Tactical Rail Accessories include a "laser" sight, flip-up iron sights, the NERF version of a grenade launcher, barrel extensions, and for some blasters, interchangeable removable stocks. On top of that, NERF also provides other nifty accessories like the 35 dart drum magazine (for the auto-shotgun Raider), a clamp that allows you to attach two magazines together for a quick-flip reload, and a tripod (for the belt-fed Vulcan). The Recon CS-6 in particular deserves special mention, as it comes with a red-light sight, a detachable stock with space to hold a spare magazine, and a barrel extension with above- and below-barrel tactical rails, an extremely generous helping of tacticool just like a real SOPMOD kit!
  • Many NERF blasters add new toys to the mix: the Spectre revolver comes with a barrel extension made up to resemble a silencer as well as a detachable folding stock, the Alpha Trooper semi-auto shotgun brings with it the 18-dart drum magazine, and the Stampede full-auto assault rifle comes with no less than 3 18-dart (non-drum) magazines, a Tac-rail-mounted ballistic shield, and a foldable detachable bipod stand. On top of that, Tactical Vests and transparent-orange magazines are now available for all you tacticool needs.
  • For even more modgasmic action, the Super Soaker water blasters and the Vortex disc blasters from one toyline have been made with full compatibility with Nerf N-Strike accessories.
  • The 2015-2016 MODULOUS Blaster toyline inherits the N-Strike lineup's propensity for blaster accessories and includes modernized versions of several classic ones like the Longshot's barrel extension/holdout pistol mashup, the detachable stocks with magazine holders, a variety of scopes, and so on.
• Megatron's original incarnation was a "The Man from U.N.C.L.E." Walther P38, with an additional barrel extension, scope (which became his fusion cannon) and stock. Megatron's stock was a bit chunkier than on the U.N.C.L.E. Special, though, as it also transformed into a stand for the extension, which became a separate cannon, though this feature was never used in the cartoon or comics.
  • The removable accessories were duplicated on the miniature Megatron guns that came with the original Masterpiece Edition Optimus Prime, and the later Masterpiece Soundwave. The Prime version retains the chunky stock from the original Megatron toy, while the Soundwave version has a cylindrical stock based on the original U.N.C.L.E. Special.
  • Unlike the larger-scale MP-5 Megatron, whose only gun accessory was the scope/fusion cannon, TakaraTomy's upcoming MP-36 Megatron is set to include the barrel extenson and stock as well. Even though the prototype images show a cylindrical stock, it can still transform into a stand for the barrel extension to form a gun emplacement like the original G1 toy.

Web Original

• Pimp My Gun is built around doing this.
• The AR 15 Builder is similar, though it's actually a custom order system for a real gun manufacturer rather than a toy.
• This site lets you play around with various accessories for a pistol.
• According to this IMMD entry, a kid managed to make an improvised sight.
• FPSRussia will typically display a variety of guns on his show with the occasional bit of Abnormal Ammo, but occasionally the main feature is an accessory/conversion kit. Past episodes have included kits to turn rifles into smaller, lighter rifles (usually cheap, plasticy garbage); kits to turn pistols into bigger, meaner pistols; and kits to turn rifles (and in one case a shotgun) into a bullpup configuration. Individual attachments like scopes are rare, though one episode about a tactical shotgun featured a variety of SWAT-style attachments.
• Iraqveteran8888 often display new accessories they have discovered and reviews; Chad often mentions how he likes to suppress his more modern weapons; and in the Tactical vs Practical episode, Barry mentions his closet full of stuff he'd bought for guns over the years that he wasn't going to put on a gun ever again. They don't set out to say that you can't have this joke if you want to, but that was intended to be comedy and they will not recommend doing that. Still, they got so many views they felt a need to go out and make a video of them shooting it (A likely story!). They have done the same to a Ruger 10/22, and posted an episode of their popular "5 Guns" series on the 5 most customisable guns.

Western Animation

• Homer Simpson joined the gun club, and was at the meeting.
  Moe holds up a rifle, attached via strings and rods to four smaller weapons.
  Moe: And that's how, with a few minor adjustments, you can turn one gun into five guns.
• Moral Orel, in the "Nature" two-parter, Clay has a cup holder for his shot glass attached to his hunting rifle.

Real Life

• In real life, the obsession with accessories often leads to terms like "geardo" and especially "tacticool" being thrown around. And debates still rage on and on as to which accessories are acceptable, but for the most part, if you slap crap on that you're most likely not going to use unless you're a SWAT member or Black Op and aren't intent on murdering anyone but poor practice targets, you'll get laughed at/flamed. Especially if you've stacked on so many accessories it's hard to find the gun underneath them◊.
  • Some take it to extremes for kicks, such as the Tacticool Mosin-Nagant below. Yes.
• 37mm flare launchers are popular as rifle accessories; not because they're even remotely useful, but because it looks like you're a badass with a proper 40mm underbarrel grenade launcher. At least that's the theory, since it's titanically unlikely anyone who actually owned such a thing would attach it to his range toy.
  • In movies, these often play the part of real underbarrel launchers, since they're cheaper, easier to get hold of, and don't require large numbers of murderously expensive destructive device permits.
• The domestic version of Germany's G36 assault rifle has a dual scope, with one of the eyepieces being a reflex sight and the other a magnifying scope.
• Combination weapons such as the XM29 OICW and Daewoo K11, make it a little hard to determine which weapon is the main and which is the accessory. The OICW gains bonus points here, since, despite weighing 18 pounds loaded (as much as two and a half loaded M4 carbines), it still had provision for mounting a bayonet.
  • That's not the most absurd case of a bayonet lug, though; in World War II there were Japanese machine guns with bayonets. The Imperial Japanese Army was rather blade-obsessed; about the only thing they didn't stick bayonets on were pistols, and that's probably simply because they didn't have the time to get away with it.

• The Muzzelite bullpup stock is an accessory stock that you actually shove the entire gun inside; after throwing in a compatible Ruger or Marlin action, you can pretend you have a proper bullpup rifle. One made of cheap plastic with a hideous trigger pull, but that's tacticool for you. These formed the basis of the Morita assault rifles in the Starship Troopers movie and the M590 assault rifles of Space: Above and Beyond. There are a wide variety of other bullpup conversion kits for a wide variety of rifles.
• Trench warfare gave the world the Periscope Rifle, a way to lean up and fire over a trench without the annoying part where the dastardly Huns blow your head off your shoulders.
  • How could you insert the Periscope Rifle without mentioning the equally goofy Krummlauf Device? Invented by the dastardly Huns for use against the Britischer pigs, Amerikaners, et.al...
• Perhaps the silliest are accessories larger than the actual gun. Such as the Cornershot, a pistol (and more recently carbine and single-shot grenade launcher) accessory the size of a full-size rifle that includes a camera and mount and allows the mounted gun to be sighted and fired around corners. Cat accessory optional. Seriously. Postal 2, eat your heart out.
  • Not so silly. Urban warfare is becoming increasingly common, and the ability to look around corners and shoot at enemies without exposing yourself to return fire is quite useful. As technology advances cornershot devices will undoubtedly become lighter, more portable, and compatible with even more types of firearms. The cat accessory might seem weird (and, well, it is) but it may also be useful for camouflaging the weapon. If the enemy sees a gun barrel poke around a corner they know you're there even if they can't hit you. But if they see what appears to be a cute little kitty cat, they may ignore it until it's too late.
  • With great irony, it was the Israelis who first revived what was originally a Nazi German weapon with a curved barrel and a reduced-charge round, so that their soldiers had a rifle capable of accurately shooting round corners for urban combat use. Their version is apparently regarded as the best in the world, which eliminates the problems the Germans had with their original.
• You knew this would exist, didn't you?◊
  • At the other end of the cup holder / gun scale, the Battle Mug features standard accessory rails and thus is actually capable of being fitted with rifle accessories (it actually comes with an M4 carry handle/rear sight as its grip), allowing you to at last have a cold one with a reflex sight and taclight.
• The Tacticool Mosin-Nagant.◊ What has science dooone?
  • Bear in mind that under US law, making these alterations would be quite illegal without registering in advance with the ATF, since the barrel is well below the 16-inch limit.
• In gun culture, a gun that has been modified in an ugly or crude way is said to have been "bubba'd"; that is, it has fallen victim to an amateur gunsmith known as "Bubba".
• There's a kit that turns a Browning M1919 into a "modern" SAW-style weapon (translation: it looks like it's from the 90s rather than the 30s, has rail sights and a foregrip). This is presumably aimed at the tiny handful of countries that still have them in reserve military service, as why anyone would want to visit such horrors on one of the relatively small number of transferrable M1919s is hard to imagine.
• The Swedish Army tactical manual outright states that when you load a magazine into your weapon before heading into a firefight, it should have another one duct-taped to it. It also instructs you on how to do it properly.
  • As ridiculous as the idea sounds, some weapons (the SIG SG 550 for example) have magazines designed to be clipped together, and Heckler and Koch even makes a specific accessory that holds two MP5 magazines together (they're about an inch apart) to facilitate speedy reloading. The practice is depreciated for calibres of 7.62x39mm and larger, however, as it adds enough weight to play merry hell with the weapon's balance.^note Ignore that, like with everything else you shouldn't do with a gun, most video games which have taped-together magazines at all will only have ones of that caliber used in this manner.
    • In the case of the SG 550, its clear-plastic magazines have tabs on both sides for clipping on additional magazines. This means that there's no theoretical limit to just how many you can clip together; instead the user can decide for himself when he's reached the level of absurdity. Actual Swiss Army practice is to clip three mags together. This is also true for the German Bundeswehr; G36 magazines can be clipped together in the same manner, but here the idea is to only do it when taking a defence position where it's possible to put the gun on a rest (like sandbags), otherwise the aforementioned aim problems would occur again.
  • This is called "Jungle Style" clipping, which has its roots in World War II with the M1 Carbine. Troopers would tape two magazines together to facilitate faster reloading.
  • While the idea may sound ridiculous for westerners, the Russian military has been using iconic blue duct tape◊ to tape mags together for a long time. In Russia it's called 'Valet welding'.
• Think underbarrel grenade launcher is cool? Try underbarrel shotgun. And yes, they actually use this in real life.
  • One of the uses for such an add-on? Shooting out the locks on doors. Or, more accurately, shooting the door off of the lock, allowing it to be easily kicked open. Hence the first such add-on, a cut-down Remington 870 shotgun attached to a mounting system to fit under the barrel of the M16 or M4, was called the "Masterkey".
• The Israeli Galil assault rifle has two accessories built into the bipod. The first is a wirecutter. The second is a bottle opener. The second may sound strange, but among the civilian reservists serving in the IDF a wide-spread habit had them popping the tops off of soda bottles with the rifle's magazines, which damaged them.
• While it may be for Airsoft, Evike posted a video on their YouTube channel of this monstrosity termed the Optic Thunder M4. It serves as an extreme example of what not to do while deciding on attachments for Airsoft guns you plan to use.
• Latvian Armed Forces have their G36KV3 assault rifles fitted with Aimpoint sights by default. If needed there are night vision attachments to go on either the helmet or on the rifle, tactical flashlights, foregrips, laser sights... Long story short, there're five (four if you have a 40mm grenade launcher) Picatinny rails of varied length on this rifle, and they are all used for something.
• The Colt Canada C7A2 is an insanely customizable weapon. The list of accessories that will fit this beast is a mile long: It can take any accessory made for the M16/M4 family of rifles, a number of accessories for completely different kinds of weapons, as well as an onslaught of accessories made specifically for it. The most common accessory it would have would be the ELCAN C79 optic sight, used by the Canadian Forces.
• The Pedersen Device is a conversion piece used in World War One to increase rate of fire from bolt action to semi automatic.
• Break-action single-barrel shotguns are antiquated due to their inability to hold more than one shell at a time. Cue the Alofs conversion, a bolt-on device that, through a clever series of trip levers and coil springs, is able to add an external magazine to the weapon that stores and feeds four additional rounds. In a surprising twist, the Alofs conversion is actually a viable piece of equipment (when properly spaced and secured, as it was fully compatible with any single-shot shotgun) despite its fantastic, Steampunk-esque appearance.
• And the ultimate, biggest accessory ever put on a gun so far is a plane. No, we are not kidding. The A-10 Thunderbolt is literally built around the GAU-8 Avenger, and when you try to make a gun that large fly, you have to design the plane to fit the gun rather than the other way around. A meme about the GAU-8 says how it's a gun with a plane attached on it as an accessory, and that is not an exaggeration.

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