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"There, you see, is a man who could hunt flies with a rifle, and command a ducal salary in a Wild West show to-day if we had him back with us."
- Mark Twain, on James Fenimore Cooper's character Natty Bumppo
If a hero picks up a sword, he will instantly gain Implausible Fencing Powers... and, conversely, if he picks up a gun, bow, crossbow, throwing-knife, shuriken, or other long-range weapon, he'll instead gain Improbable Aiming Skills.
Basically, it's the natural flip-side to the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy—while villainous Mooks are terrible at aiming, heroes are equally superb at it. This enables such feats as Blasting It Out Of Their Hands or the Offhand Backshot, the firearm-based answer to the Offhand Backhand, and is in no way dependent on the factual accuracy of the weapons in question... a frequent user of this trope is The Western, where the heroes are often using guns that were, in real life, notoriously inaccurate at anything other than point-blank range—for feats that would make a modern-day Sniper with a top-tuned high-tech rifle turn green with envy.
Is sometimes parodied by implying that the shooter meant to do something entirely different and messed up in a spectacularly lucky way.
The Achilles Heel to someone with this ability is someone who can Dodge The Bullet.
Almost always used by The Gunslinger (or, in fantasy settings, any archer character). Contrast with A Team Firing, More Dakka and the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy.
Examples:
Literature
- Classic examples include Wilhelm Tell and Robin Hood, who make this Older Than Print. Natty Bumppo (as mentioned in the quote) was probably the first character to do this with guns, or at least to do it with guns and get famous.
- In the novel Drakon, Gwen Ingolfsson intentionally shoots a running man in the knee, at long range, on the first shot, with an inaccurate handgun that she's never even seen before as she's just arrived on an Alternate Earth. Yes, she's a genetically-engineered superwoman, but that incredibly loud explosion was the Willing Suspension Of Disbelief undergoing spontaneous combustion.
- The same author's Dies the Fire series features a number of improbably good archers, though at least all of them are explicitly described as practicing constantly and having been at it since childhood.
- Parodied in the Discworld novel, Pyramids, the main character is on his final exam for his Assassination class and decides he can't kill the person sleeping in the bed, even if it means his teachers may kill him for disobeying. So he defiantly shoots his crossbow at the wall, and it happens to ricochet off several surfaces and into what turns out to be a dummy. He passes the final exam, but his instructor chides him for using showy, over-the-top methods in his assassination.
- And subverted in Guards! Guards! wherein Colon claims to amazing feats of archery (and possibly rightfully so in his youth, but still...) but actually can't hit the broad side of a dragon, let alone the Achilles Heel he was aiming for.
- His skill or lack thereof had very little to do with it. His friends talked him into trying the shot while wearing a blindfold, standing on his head, and so on, in an attempt to get the shot to be exactly a Million To One Chance... because million-to-one chances always work out, right?
- Also worth noting is the dragon, being female, actually lacked the specific Achilles Heel being aimed for.
- In the Halo Novel First Strike, Master Chief is getting help in a battle from Linda, another Super Soldier like him, armed with a sniper rifle. During the course of the fight, Linda makes a number of difficult shots, often shooting enemy pilots right out of their flyers while in flight (and in at least one case, using a ricochet to do it). When he finally grabs a flier of his own to go pick her up, he finds her hanging from a cord, and realizes she's been doing all that shooting one-handed.
- To be fair, their Mark V armor responds to thoughts, not muscle movement, and being a half ton suit that equates to zero recoil and precision aim.
- Honor Harrington puts 4 rounds into a guy, straight up the center, within centimeters of each other, before he even falls down, from the hip, before raising the gun and putting a fifth one between his eyes. From 40 meters away (over 120 feet, to us Americans not in the military). Over the span of about three seconds. Justified in that she has a cybernetic eye, and practiced like mad.
- The Warhammer 40000: Gaunt's Ghosts novel Honour Guard includes a passage where the character Lijah Cuu effortlessly shoots tiny critters that even the titular regiment's marksman Larkin would hesitate about going after. Unfortunately, he's also the regiment's Ax Crazy...
- Subverted in Flashman by George Mac Donald Fraser, where the title character participates in a duel; because Flashman has rigged his opponent's gun, the opponent misses, and Flashman decides he will not shoot his opponent, instead firing a harmless shot into the air...which ends up blasting the top off of a bottle of alcohol some distance away. Everyone takes this as proof of incredible marksmanship, giving his reputation a major boost.
- Good old Sharpe has this a few times. Hagman, a former poacher, is an amazing shot, and proves it repeatedly by shooting Frenchmen at just the right moment. The only time he misses is the first time you see him... because he's trying to shoot a rabbit at 200 meters with a blackpowder rifle, without aiming. And he still almost hits.
- When he's not recovering from torture, Stephen Maturin of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin is a crack shot with a pistol, much to the shock of a few people around him.
- Given that the article goes so far as to mention Gunslingers, this troper is more than slightly surprised that THE Gunslinger remains unmentioned. Roland of Gilead (and to be fair actually any of the gunslingers) is the embodiment of this trope, with improbable aiming skills demonstrated any time he draws (generally at lightning speed).
Television
- Jack Bauer... because he's Jack Bauer.
- Shooting the gun out of Bad Guy's hand was a routine shot in the kiddie TV Westerns of the 1950s. The title character in Annie Oakley never shot anyone in any other way. It made her even nicer as a heroine.
- In the Red Dwarf episode "White Hole" Lister displays Improbable Aiming Skills when it comes to driving a planet into a white hole by stimulating a solar flare. While this sounds like a mindbogglingly complex procedure, it's basically the same as playing pool. Apparently. (He was even able to make it a trick shot!)
- Improbable Aiming Skills are spoofed when the crew enters a Western VR environment in "Gunmen of the Apocalypse". Both the Cat (as The Riviera Kid, gunfighter) and Lister (as Brett Riverboat, knife-thrower) were able to do things that were clearly completely impossible... until the special skills were erased from the databank.
- In Lost, Locke is scarily accurate with throwing knives, in one early episode planting a knife in a chair right next to Sawyer's head, from a good 15 feet away, just to make a point.
- Jack is also a good enough shot to shoot a rope, despite having no discernible experience with weapons.
- The Others are also excellent shots, the anti-stormtroopers.
- Parodied/Subverted in the first episode of Buffy season 3. While trying to take down a vampire without the Slayer's help, Oz, Willow and Xander get beaten and the vampire starts running away. Oz stands dramatically with stake in hand, the music swells and he throws the stake only to have it clatter harmlessly off a nearby gravestone. He sighs and says "That never really works".
- In The Man From UNCLE episode "The Never Never Affair", Napoleon Solo demonstrates Improbable Aiming Skills when, bound to a chair and forced to hold a pistol with his hands tied behind his back, he nonetheless warns a THRUSH agent that any attempt to detonate an explosive booby trap in the face of other U.N.C.L.E. agents arriving at the scene would result in Solo shooting the THRUSH agent. The THRUSH baddie pooh poohs Solo's threat, and makes for the detonator, only to be shot by Solo. Solo then hangs a lampshade on it by looking surprised and muttering, "Well what do you know!" when he sees the THRUSH agent go down.
- In Brimstone, Detective Ezekiel Stone has no problem shooting out the eyes of the escaped souls.
- Firefly runs rampant with this. A lot of shots are pulled from the hip, but nonetheless hit targets quite precisely; Zoe even manages to shoot a man's gun out of his hands from a good fifty meters off in "Safe," and Mal's quick-draw shots are almost legendary.
- Also, River killing three of Niska's men with one shot each, while her eyes are closed, and the bad guys are hiding behind cover...Jayne's disbelief is understandable. So is his line, "She killed them with math, what else could it be?", heavy on the sarcasm.
- Early in Serenity, Jayne gets hit with a harpoon fired by Reavers, and Mal shoots the rope to free him. But it takes him three tries.
- The Lone Ranger used this to avoid ever having to kill an opponent.
Film
- John Woo Presents Stranglehold. 'nuff said.
- Legolas also demonstrates a truly astounding aim with his longbow in Lord Of The Rings—of course, improbable skill with a bow is a feature commonly credited to elves in most fantasy settings.
- Plus, no matter what Orlando Bloom looks like, you gotta remember Legolas is about eight hundred years old. If you practiced with the bow for eight hundred years, with even a modicum of talent you'd probably end up astounding too.
- There have been at least three cases (specifically The Magnificent Seven, Blakes Seven and Firefly- the latter two are probably homages to the first) where are a character is commended for a good shot only for them to say they were aiming somewhere else.
- The Mel Brooks send-up Robin Hood: Men In Tights. Robin has the noose around his neck, but gets saved when the Moor fires an arrow that slices the noose from the gallows, allowing him to escape. We later find out that the target was the hangman.
- On one episode of Criminal Minds, while in a hostage crisis, Spencer Reid shoots the crook and mass murderer dead center of the forehead. Not only was he said to have failed his firearms qualification that the start of the episode, he claimed he'd been aiming for the guy's knee. At a distance of about six feet, that's a spectacularly bad shot.
- This Troper is pretty sure he was trying to make a joke as the crook in question had an automatic weapon, so aiming for his knee would have been tantamount to suicide. Even a center of mass shot would have left the hostage taker able to get off several rounds before dying.
- Also seen in The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad where-in the mostly useless comic relief stuns everybody by felling a threatening Bad Guy with a cross bow. Afterward admitting he did it by aiming 'at everything else'!
- In the film "Geronimo", the titular character manages to shatter a jar of whiskey just as an opponent is taking a drink from several yards away. When he's commended for a good shot, Geronimo unabashedly admits, "Not so good. I was aiming for his head."
- Ridiculously fast and accurate shooting was one of the standard features of Spaghetti Westerns and one of the things that distinguished them from standard American films of any quality. Amazingly, Clint Eastwood's ability to fast-draw a handgun, shoot, and kill any number of men in any fight without missing a shot was seen by some critics as making his films more realistic ("gritty, rugged") than the plausible shooting skills of a John Wayne, Glenn Ford, Jimmy Stewart, or Randolph Scott film.
- In Hitman, the film of the game series, Agent 47 scores an impressive streak of headshots with his pistols during the hotel escape scene.
- Pick a sniper movie. ANY sniper movie. This troper still finds it unbelievable that one can find a target, adjust for physics, and the fire in less than a couple of seconds. At a distance of more than 1 km (Which is well out of the effective range of most sniper rifles to begin with).
- Generally averted in the film Shooter where the main character picks the site where he'd assassinate the president of the US (if he was intending to do that) based on criteria like distance, angle, local wind turbulence and line of sight. Later in the film, an observant FBI agent watching a recording of the shot realizes that the flags on the stage indicated there was no way a good sniper would have missed (as the shooter apparently did) in the way everyone believes he did, thus the "accidental" target was more likely the real one.
- Used heavily elsewhere in the film, especially the helicopter scene. There are snipers good enough to find a target, adjust for wind and drop, and fire in less than a couple seconds, but there aren't any live ones that would try to hit the rotary blade on a helicopter.
- There's actually a (really recent) sniper rifle that has an effective range of 2 miles. Of course, at that distance, a breeze would put you off your target by 10 feet or so.
- Air fight scene in Shoot 'em Up. 'Nuff said
- In fact, the main character is this trope personified. The sheer absurdity of the gunfighting in this movie has to be seen to be believed. Possibly best summed up by this line from the main antagonist, "Do we really suck, or is he really that good?"
- The Blaxploitation film Three The Hard Way has the heroes with glorified cap pistols defeating the Mooks who have fully automatic machine guns.
- The 2004 Dawn Of The Dead remake offers a borderline example with the character of Andy, who proves to be very accurate with zombie-killing headshots. Of course, the man owns a gun store, and is shooting from the safety of his roof using a high-powered rifle with a scope. And there's the fact that there are so many zombies, it's like trying to drain the ocean with a teaspoon...
- Subverted in Shaun of the Dead, where the gang has to team up in order to reliably use a rifle "that actually works". The scene plays out exactly like the earlier one when Shaun and Ed are playing Timesplitters at home. Their aim does improve, though.
- The Bourne Supremacy features an instantly-fatal shot against a human target at around 200 metres. The target (Marie) is not only moving away, she's inside a car travelling at about 20 mph, the shot is through traffic and the sniper hits on his first shot from a standing position.
- Of course, that's not the only thing wrong with that scene. Like, maybe, killing off the female lead in the first five minutes because you don't know how to write for her any more. Not bitter at all, no sah.
- Marie wasn't the target. And that's not why they killed her. Nicky's hotter anyway.
- The Arnold Schwarzenegger movie True Lies is full of this trope and enemies who attended the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy as well. One scene in particular stands out: Arnold’s character is escaping down a snow covered hill by sliding down it on his back and using a pistol to take out pursuing enemies on skis, at night; the aforementioned enemy marksmanship can be seen here as well.
- In House of Flying Daggers Jin fires off four arrows in quick succesion at the four soldiers attacking Xiao Mei. Not only does each of them hit the target, said target is a spot where the arrow will stick in their clothes without hurting them since the whole thing is a setup for him to earn Xiao Mei's trust.
- Wanted. It's not out yet, but the ads make it out to be Improbable Aiming Skills: The Movie. How bad? Throwing a curveball with bullets, shooting the wings off of insects, shooting down an enemy's bullet intentionally, and on and on. The fact that the ads showcase this and tell nothing about the plot... well, be afraid. Be very afraid.
- It's out now, and it's worse than you feared. Bullets fired from guns don't need to go in straight lines. With a flick of the wrist, an assassin can get a bullet to swerve around an obstacle and hit a target directly behind said obstacle. Yes, that means they can shoot around corners without relying on ricochets to change the trajectory. The most egregious example, hands-down, comes in the climax. A member of the Fraternity (a secret society of assassins that decides who to kill by studying textiles) has decided that the abilities wielded by the assassins are too dangerous in the hands of mortals. This rebellious member fires a single bullet that travels around the room in a circular path, killing most of the remaining members, and comes back around, hitting the person who fired the bullet. Rule Of Cool and all that.
- In Support Your Local Sheriff James Garner is asked to demonstrate his gun handling skills and manages to both subvert and play the trope straight. He begins by tossing a washer into the air and shooting at it with his pistol, then claiming the bullet went through the hole. The skeptical townsfolk ask him to repeat the stunt, although for the second shot a piece of tape is applied to the washer. Guess where the second bullet goes?
- Inverted in the Iron Man movie, where a mook in a tank picks off Iron Man while he's engaged in a dogfight. The mooks with firearms are also pretty sharp, if only to demonstrate the imperviousness of Iron Man's phlebotinum suit.
- Played straight in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, in which Arnie manages to shoot every cop in the Cyberdyne parking lot... with a minigun... non-fatally. After all, John Connor told him not to kill anyone.
- Averted in the original Robo Cop. Robo can pull off all kinds of amazing feats of ballistics, including neutering a would-be rapist by shooting through his victim's skirt, but it's all programming - the original Murphy couldn't shoot for beans, and after a Directive 4 malfunction takes his targeting systems offline, neither can Robo.
Comic Books
- While all The Minutemen from One Hundred Bullets wield handguns with deadly accuracy; Minuteman Willie Tymes never misses. His fellow agents gave him a nickname "My first shot is my last."
- Lucky Luke is the quintessential Wild West example. He can shoot off the firing pin of a derringer tinier than a pinky—and do so faster than his shadow. There are other occasions of improbable aiming in the comics—in one instance, two Dalton brothers shoot two bullets at each other that collide with each other half-way between them.
- Inverted by Bullseye from the Marvel Universe—the simple fact that he's got aim roughly on par with your average good-guy takes him from 'villain' to 'supervillain'.
- Not just with guns either. He displays god-like accuracy with anything he picks up.
- He's not even limited to accuracy. He has such an uncanny sense of ballistics and trajectory that he can aim in the opposite direction of his target and still score a direct hit.
- And not just with accuracy, but physics-defying force. No matter how perfect your aim is, it's highly improbable that someone can hurl many everyday objects hard enough to do any damage. If he had telekinesis, sure...
- This was demonstrated to an absurd degree in his very first appearance: he threw a paper airplane through a closed window from several blocks away. And that was just to deliver a threatening message. He later killed the recipient of the threat by hitting his jugular with a ballpoint pen casually thrown across a room.
- And to top that all off; he's not even a mutant.
- From both The DCU and Marvel comics, self-trained superhero archers Green Arrow and Hawkeye, and their families of characters, can ricochet arrows off walls and into targets. And that's not even getting into "boxing glove arrows", "bomb arrows", "net arrows" or "cat arrows" (don't ask). They have, at times, been depicted as so implausibly good, some people theorize that they actually have psychokinesis and are simply using it to show off by making it look like they're the world's greatest archers. The fact that the artists and writers of their titles usually don't do very much research into how archers actually even hold their bows drives it home for a lot of people.
- In The Dark Knight Returns, Green Arrow has lost an arm and still manages to be a crackshot.
- In Marvel's Ultimate universe, Hawkeye is an expert marksman who chooses to use a bow because of the challenge. He was shown to be deadly with anything he could throw, even killing a room full of armed guards while strapped down to a chair by flicking his fingernails.
- In the Sin City story Hell and Back, a sniper has a rifle with telescopic sights mounted on a tripod. He misses, the good guy, Wallace, returns fire, across a street, into a darkened building with a short-barreled revolver. His bullet goes down the telescopic sight and through the snipers eye into his brain.
- Both Sin City and The Badger have featured a character throwing an object with such accuracy that it plugs the barrel of an enemy's gun. What wouldn't a darts player give to be able to throw like that?
- Given that there are plenty of darts players who can repeatedly hit three triple 20s in a row, and given that Miho was considerably closer to Jackie Boy than the oche is to the board, this may not be that unlikely.
- Daredevil has also done the plugging-a-gun (and surely Bullseye too, though I can't think of any specific examples). Frank Miller really likes these feats, doesn't he?
- Allan Quartermain gained access to The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen mostly by virtue of his Improbable Aiming Skills. At least he's got the good grace to use a rifle.
- The Saint of Killers from Preacher has magical (they were made from the sword of the Angel of Death) revolvers that cannot miss, never run out of bullets, never jam, never inflict anything less than a fatal wound, and can be drawn faster than the eye can see. Given that he's also completely invulnerable, getting on his bad side (or, for that matter, getting close to him) is not recommended. In the final issue he kills God with his guns
- Lightly used in Usagi Yojimbo: At a carnival, samurai Usagi cannot hit a target while Rich Bitch turned Defrosting Ice Queen Kiku gets a bull's eye on her first try. She explains that she "just aimed everywhere except the target."
- Deadshot, a gun-wielding assassin and sometime Heroic Sociopath from the DCU, has a long-standing reputation for never missing his shot (unless he happens to be aiming at Batman). In a recent miniseries, he took out six targets scattered around a room while blindfolded.
- Earlier in the same series, he failed to shoot a target in the bullseye while blindfolded...because Captain Boomerang Jr. had hit all his bullets in mid-air, using bent paperclips. (Admittedly using superspeed, but still.) In the Outsiders, while in a prison riot, Captain Boomerang Jr. had grabbed and throw something, bouncing it off the walls, to hit and knock out a fellow prisoner.
- Superman, in one comic, pretends to be a villain named the Golden Dart, kidnaps Lois Lane, and throws darts at her. His Improbable Aiming Skills allow him to keep himself from hitting Lois, instead missing her by "scant inches".
- To be fair, it's SUPERMAN...he could just put the darts there while we blink...
- Kid Twist, a particularly slimy individual from Joss Whedon's run on Runaways, has this as a power - Once he sets eyes on a target, he never misses. This includes casually firing his gun behind him, and having the bullet turn corners.
- In an early issue of Cable & Deadpool, while Wade (Deadpool) is casually conversing with Nate (Cable) about how he no longer feels the urge to kill, he rolls a pebble around between his fingers. When Nate's not looking, he lets it fly and nails a dragonfly so that the pebble knocks the body dead-center, leaving the wings on either side. (Really.)
- Straight Arrow Strongbow of Elf Quest never misses, to the point that when he does it's an obvious sign that he's in a bad way psychologically. And shortly after recovering from that, he gets the ability to hit a target without evening seeing it, though he's assumed to owe that to magical help.
Western Animation
- The Yuyan Archers from Avatar The Last Airbender can literally shoot the wings off a fly (or at least pin it to a tree from a hundred paces away—without killing it), or at least that's what Zhao said. Though this was most likely hyperbole, they are able to pin Aang to a log by his shirt and nail someone hiding behind a human shield in the head.
- Mai has also demonstrated impeccable and deadly accurate knife-throwing skills. Although sometimes it's shuriken. She keeps several dozen in the sleeves of her robe.
- The ARC Troopers from the Clone Wars miniseries on Cartoon Network possess impressive powers of accuracy, almost every shot blasts a droid's head off and a single trooper takes out a Trade Federation armored tank in less than 5 seconds by running up the side of it, blasting the top off, shooting several shots from the inside of the machine and running like hell.
- Joked with in Treasure Planet, where Dr. Doppler (who doesn't appear to have held a gun before) manages to shoot and hit his mark exactly.
Captain Amelia: Did you actually aim for that?
Dr. Doppler: Strangely enough I did.
- Averted in Code Lyoko, where Odd and Yumi miss quite frequently, especially when the shot would be difficult in real life (i.e. shooting at a moving target). Then again, since often the enemies simply dodge, and Odd's arrows are often shown moving as fast as a real arrow, this might be a case of The Computer Is A Cheating Bastard. Played relatively straight with Aelita (after she gains her Energy Field in season 3), who only misses when she's distressed.
Anime
- Jojo's Bizarre Adventure has Hol Horse, whose Stand basically grants him Improbable Aiming Skills as he can control where the bullet goes after he's fired it.
- Even further along the timeline is Guido Mista, who's Sex Pistols Stand kicks the bullets he fires out of a gun. Subverted in the sense that if he doesn't feed them first they won't work and also will sometimes beat each other up.
- Mana Tatsumiya in Mahou Sensei Negima could ricochet her bullets and hit her targets with a sniper rifle, even when she couldn't see the target and was firing impact-fused bullets which should have detonated instead of bouncing. Similarly Gandolfini, one of the mage-teachers, was capable of intercepting an incoming bullet and hitting it head-on with one of his own.
- The king of Improbable Marksmanship, however, is probably Vash the Stampede from Trigun. Capable of putting a bullet down the barrel of a sniper's BFG from a kilometer or so away. Earlier in the series, he attends a quick-draw contest, and is able to ensure that every hit is non-lethal by flicking pebbles at the bullets in-flight and altering their course.
- That's not even counting the time he managed to defeat a foe by shooting off the straps of his battle armor all so fast nobody noticed AND without the gunfire making a sound. It was more than enough to destroy this editor's willing suspension of disbelief into 1000 tiny shards, then set those shards on fire.
- Nicholas D. Wolfwood from the same series was also quite good, but he naturally pales against Vash.
- This editor believes that Vash lost the title to Rushunya Tendo, the main character of Grenadier. Also a peace-loving, gun toting blond in a red jacket, she at one point stopped a massive barrage of bullets by firing a single bullet, that caused a chain reaction where each bullet deflected the next bullet down the line until the final bullet destroying the machine gun firing said bullets (To be fair, the gun in question was firing them in a very tight spiral (kind of like an inverted gatling gun), but it's impressive nonetheless).
- This editor would also like to point out the final battle in the series, in which Rushunya faces off against her Evil Counterpart: 80% of the bullets they fired would hit each other exactly between them. In one case, rapid-fired while jumping away from each other.
- Train of Black Cat pulls many stunts similar to Vash, including shooting down both barrels of a Dual Wielding opponent and shooting other people's bullets out of the air (after a few seconds talking about how their shots would be ineffective anyway). Maybe most improbable is when he shoots a can off a stump, then shoots it five more times while in the air, aiming at the same spot where he shot it the first time. He only hits three, gets annoyed, and is later spotted next to a pile of similar cans having wasted a lot of bullets. One can only assume he got it right at some point.
- The vampire leads of Hellsing are extremely good (though not infallible) shots due to a sort of "third eye" superpower they have. Even more impressive is the manga's Rip van Winkle, whose magical rifle fires bullets that change course mid-flight to such a degree that they can hit multiple targets and blow up helicopters.
- The fully human Integra Hellsing (in the first TV series at least). She is shown as capable of shooting the exact same spot on a target repeatedly (creating a single hole in it) and rapidly shooting the shape of a cross into the face of a vampire (take into account the gun's recoil and the fact that the vampire would stagger back after each shot).
- Amazing shooting skills are a key characteristic of the female assassins in the anime Noir. Among other things, one of the characters—on two separate occasions—is capable of shooting the blade off a knife being swung at her partner. She does this with a handgun at up to fifty feet away.
- Then again, Kirika was also raised from earliest childhood to be the perfect assassin, so it's reasonable to assume that her training included lots and lots and LOTS of firearms practice.
- This editor is appalled that no mention of Gunsmith Cats has been made. The entire series revolves around high-octane gunning and driving around the streets of Chicago—and the main character's trademarked ability to shoot her opponents' trigger finger off at a generous distance. (Hence her nickname, "Thumb-Snap Rally".) She's also hit an oncoming RPG dead-center to detonate it before it reached her; and when asked at gunpoint to disarm, she let her clip fall on her foot, whereupon she kicked it back into place and shot her assailant (who was understandably dumbstruck at the maneuver).
- Seto Kaiba from Yu-Gi-Oh, who on more than one occasion knocks something out of someone's hand with a piece of cardboard.
- Before him, there was the Agent S5, who used poker cards as projectiles.
- Usopp from One Piece is such a good shot with just about anything that he often surprises even himself. Not only that, his weapon of choice is a slingshot, and he can still out-snipe riflemen.
- There are two other characters in the series, who, at least at the time of their introduction, actually outclassed Usopp in Improbable Aiming Skills. These are Yasopp, Usopp's father, who has claimed to be able to hit an ant between its eyes. The other is Van Auger, who has demonstrated lethal accuracy from so far away the main characters can't even see the island he's shooting from, yet. It is unclear whether or not Usopp has surpassed either yet, though it seems almost inevitable that he ultimately will.
- Riza Hawkeye from Fullmetal Alchemist. Her idea of disciplining a puppy is to sending full clips of pistol around it, without even grazing the puppy. Not to mention that she can face even the most menacing monster calmly, only lost it when he thought her beloved boss is dead.
- Akane from Ranma 1/2 usually prefers to use her fists, feet, or the random blunt object (mallets, bamboo swords, the nearby smokestack...) but when she picks up bow and arrow, she's deadly.
- Ranma also exhibits some aiming skills, as he was once able to flick a stub-sized pencil from across the classroom, while jumping, and stick it point-first into the hole of the fifty-yen coin in his teacher's hand. He was also able to jam a polearm weapon perfectly into the key-like slot on a statue, while falling from several hundred feet in the air.
- In Higurashi no Naku Koro ni Kai, Kasai manages to snipe out all four tires of a van (think of the angles!) in under 7 seconds from a great distance. This apparently requires no resighting, reloading, or any movement on the part of the shooter.
- There are modern rifles that redirect the recoil of the rifle into a mechanism that loads the next bullet in the magazine, though, which would solve the first two problems.
- In Rose Of Versailles, Oscar is a legend with a sword, so when someone challenges her to a pistol duel, everyone thinks that she's ***ed. However, one Ret Con later, she's also been practicing with guns her whole life. Who knew?
- Kurz Weber of Full Metal Panic is apparently one of the most naturally talented marksmen in the world, and generally handles sniping duties for his unit. This includes, at one point, making a shot from the back of a moving truck that goes straight into a Humongous Mecha 's machinegun, disabling the weapon - using an ordinary sniper rifle.
- Compared to Kurz, Sousuke's marksmanship is merely normal, but he still nails a watermelon from something like fifty paces, blindfolded, during a game of crack-the-watermelon in Full Metal Panic? Fumoffu.
- The Major from Ghost In The Shell once shot a fleeing perp in the ankle, as he was landing from a jump, at what could have been no less than a hundred meters. Justified somewhat with the Major being a full cyborg capable of acting with literally mechanical precision.
- Vice of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, who managed to snipe the head of a Combat Cyborg who was attacking an ally, with said ally being in the way of his line of sight, through a building window, from a moving helicopter that couldn't be seen from said building. And he did this while said cyborg had previously been playing possum, so he only had a split second to react and perform the shot.
- Golgo 13 beats all of the above. In the movie The Professional, he killed a man by aiming through the skyscraper between them. Not enough for you? The pinnacle of improbable aim comes from the chapter "Hollywood Cinderella", where he aimed at a target by watching them on TV. He could probably shoot you from another continent given the right gun.
Video Games
- Dante from the Devil May Cry series is a pretty damn good shot even in the game proper, but only demonstrates truly ridiculous levels of skill in the cutscenes, such as as the intro of Devil May Cry 3, where he—among other things—kills several Mooks with a single bullet by sending a bunch of billiard-balls into the air, and then shooting one of them in such a way that it starts a chain-reaction, sending the balls flying in all directions like gigantic, colorful buckshot.
- Then again, he is a human/demon hybrid using literally magical demonic handguns.
- In Devil May Cry 4, Dante puts a round through the Mad Scientist Agnus' papers. When Agnus picks one up to examine the damage, Dante puts another round through the exact same hole to kill him.
- In the same game, in the boss encounters with Dante, he rarely uses his guns, unless of course Nero tries to shoot him, at which point Dante will begin to shoot the bullets out of the air.
- Also in the same game, Dante manages to pull off 'stacking' five bullets on the end of the handle of his sword (a la Robin Hood, just with bullets), stuck inside the Big Bad, each landing perfectly behind the other, with the final one thrusting it into its core.
- Partially subverted in Deus Ex. Weapons in which you are untrained or only slightly trained have very bad aim. Although the player can start off with very good aim in one type of weapon or decent aim in several, they'll still have a few really inaccurate crappy ones for most of the game until enough skill points are gathered to push them to Advanced or Master training level.
- Revolver Ocelot from Metal Gear Solid is another one of the rare, villainous examples. Though wielding a revolver (and never, ever using his other hand to steady it) he's still got unerring accuracy on-par with even Sniper Wolf. Including richocheting bullets off of walls. When Cyborg Ninja cuts off his right hand, he just starts shooting with his left instead, without any perceptible drop in accuracy...
- Well, whether he knows it or not, he is the son of a psychic. That doesn't explain how in a New Game Plus file Snake can more or less pull off the same stunts, shooting around walls and even aiming behind enemies and hitting them in the back.
- Metal Gear Solid 3 semi-subverts this; the future Big Boss, then known as Naked Snake, gave Ocelot the idea of using a revolver as his weapon of choice, after noticing that with his previous gun (a Makarov PM handgun), he twisted his elbow to absorb the recoil, which actually worsened his aim with it.
- Also subverted in the same game, where Ocelot at one point adds a stock to the revolver to steady his aim.
- And fully subverted in The Twin Snakes, where during the torture scene, Ocelot is spinning his gun on his left hand and drops it by accident—lending a bit of credibility that his left hand isn't quite as accurate as his right. Though he later goes on to shoot the PAL key out of Snake's hand near the end of the game.
- Ironically, in Twin Snakes it is the legendary sniper villain character Sniper Wolf who somewhat subverts this trope by submitting to certain real-world sniping necessities of behavior: her accuracy suffers unless she's lying down, she takes an elevated position and plans ahead to hold that superior position throughout her battles. The irony comes from nearly every other villain in the game embodying a trope in order to make themselves unique, while Wolf's more conventional sniping ability is soundly trumped by Solid Snake's employment of two tropes multiplied together. In the cutscene in which Wolf is defeated (following a player-controlled sniper-fight boss battle in an outdoor snowfield in Alaska, against an enemy wearing all white, in the midst of a blizzard), Snake is suddenly disarmed by Wolf shooting the PSG-1 sniper rifle from his grip and taking a bead on his forehead. She is undone, however, when Snake suddenly performs a perfect backflip, lands with his heel against the rifle's stock to propel it into the air, executes a full 360 turn to grab it, aims, and fires the killing shot straight into Wolf's lungs from more than a hundred yards distant. In Wolf's defense, she does recover from surprise in time to return fire simultaneously, but without the power of being the primary focus of the cutscene, her shot harmlessly misses. The combined power of Improbable Aiming Skills and Cutscene Power To The Max has a resonance, it seems, rendering the protagonist briefly perfect.
- Altaïr, the main character of Assassin's Creed, also displays an unbelieveable level of accuracy with his throwing-knives. His knives always hit, even on a moving target that changes direction unexpectedly, and ALWAYS kills instantly, without even giving the victim a chance to cry out. Well, unless it's one of your 'Targets', in which case they just basically ignore the throwing-knives for no apparent reason.
- Gordon Freeman in Half Life. He's not shown to be supernaturally accurate, at least compared to other First Person Shooter heroes. However, unlike almost all other FPS heroes (who at least have some form of military background), he's a theoretical physicist who's never picked up a gun in his life prior to the events of the game. This makes incredibly impressive his ability to rapidly learn to use an assault rifle well enough to fight off both an alien invasion and a battalion of highly trained special forces soldiers.
- Well, except for the firing range in the hazard course which is apparently mandatory for all employees... Though, it's never clear how often they're required to run it.
- Final Fantasy Tactics Advance makes use of arc trajectory algorithms for Archers/Hunters/Snipers/Assasins with bows and line-of-sight algorithms for Gunners to see if a projectile would be obstructed by an obstacle or the terrain itself due to tiles with varying heights to make it seem more realistic... but this all goes out the window when you order your bowmen/gunslingers to use specials, which ignore those algorithms and just check to see if the target is within weapon range. This leads to cases where you can have an archer shoot at something that's pretty much 2 tiles away and 10 storeys above, or have a gunner SHOOT THROUGH A MOUNTAIN FACE AT POINT BLANK RANGE and hit the target on the other side, 7 panels away.
- It's amusing to think that a bullet backed up by Ultima Charge would behave this way.
Webcomics
- A comic
 of 8-Bit Theater had Black Mage and Red Mage discussing on who'd win in a fight: Bullseye and Green Arrow, based on either's Improbable Aiming Skills. RM then said Green Arrow could shoot several arrows precisely at once. BM argued—and was pinned to a tree by such an attack...
- Parodied in this strip of The Last Days Of Foxhound with a shooting contest between Sniper Wolf and Revolver Ocelot.
Fanfics
Real Life
- Real World Examples: A number of competition and professional shooters, over a number of decades, have performed incredible feats of gunplay. These include going from a standing rest position to drawing and firing an killing headshot in 0.26 timed seconds—and being even faster than that, being able to throw a handful of eight clay pigeons behind them and promptly shoot all of them in the air with a shotgun, setting up two targets and using a sword in between and in front of them to cut the bullet and strike both targets accurately, being able to fire sixty rounds from ten revolvers and put every shot into a four inch circle in 17 seconds—picking up and putting down each revolver in succession, firing eight rounds from a revolver in 1.00 timed seconds (480rpm—matching a machinegun's rate of fire!) with all rounds hitting the target, and many, many more. It should also be pointed out that these shooters practice daily, going through tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition per year, and are the absolute top masters of their respective field at an Olympic level of skill. Look up folks like Bill Munden, Ed Cantrell, Elmer Keith, Jerry Miculek, or Rob Leatham for starts...or, for that matter, Annie Oakley.
- Getting away from handguns and shotguns, three notable sniper shots: the legendary Carlos Hathcock, 2,286 meters, the current record set by Rob Furlong, 2,430 meters. The difficulty of these long ranges is pointed out by the facts like Furlong's shot, at a moving target, took 4 seconds to go from the gun and had abullet drop of about 146 feet. Beating even that was Royal Marine Matt Hughes. Although his shot at an Iraqi sentry was a relatively short 860 meters, the gale-force crosswind meant his bullet curved 56 feet sideways.
- Simo Hayha. Of particular note is that Hayha did all of his work without a scope. Yeah. The greatest sniper in history used only iron sights. He may not have matched other snipers in sheer range, but you have got to respect a sniper so skilled he hunted with only a pair of very fine-tuned bits of metal telling him where his shots were going to go.
- Military snipers in general. US Army snipers average one confirmed kill for every 1.78 bullets fired. Add in the probable kills, and the accuracy goes up to one kill for every 1.32 bullets fired.
- Not that shooting guns out of people's hands can't be done, it's just too awesome but impractical to use.
- An old man, who's name escapes this troper, has actually imitated Robin Hood's arrow splitting shot almost to a tee, the only difference being that the arrow that was being targeted was pushed through the bull's-eye instead of split in twain. WAS IT MENTIONED THAT THE GUY IS ELDERLY?
Web Original
- A Survival Of The Fittest example is Trish McCarroll. Using an AK (notorious for recoil) that she'd never fired before (or any guns for that matter), she managed to hit Sloan Henriksen four times in the heart in a single burst of fire. It's put down to luck, but still, for somebody who has never used a gun it was an incredible feat. Amusingly, given that SOTF is a play by post game, it was actually Sloan's handler that caused the Improbable Aiming Skills. (by mentioning which places the characters was hit in the death post)
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