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Each gun only has one bullet.
The habit of characters in action shows to simply throw away guns when they run out of magazines during a gunfight. Even the poorest of combatants will dispose of a gun by dumping it as soon as it goes dry. The logic seems to be that it is more important to maintain a steady rate of fire than it is to conserve resources such as weapons.
Of course, it's also getting tossed away if it happens to jam, because in Hollywood there's no way to fix that.
Never mind that guns are expensive, especially the ones carried by the Big Bad or by our intrepid hero(es). Or that, if you're trying to keep your identity concealed from someone (the vigilante-hating police, for example), you just left an object coated in your fingerprints for them to find (although that is an overrated risk: see Fingerprinting Air).
The Cop Show variation is that no one thinks twice when a cop loses his gun or has it stolen by the Big Bad. When this happens in real life, it's a serious affair resulting in tons of paperwork, formal reprimands and IAD investigations. Repeat offenses result in suspensions and dismissal. Ditto in the military; if you lose your assigned weapon somehow, it can be cause to SHUT DOWN THE ENTIRE BASE. The exception to this is when it becomes a plot point, such as the cop getting shot with his own gun.
When mooks face a Super Hero they often fire all available rounds at the superhero, look at their now-useless gun ( Oh, if they had if only remembered reloads!), then throw the gun at the hero either in frustration, stupidity, or desperation.
See Shooting Superman.
Examples
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- Meryl Strife from Trigun did this to an extreme, with dozens of one-shot derringer pistols lining her cloak, which she'd go through quite rapidly in a gunfight. On occasion, Wolfwood was also shown using a large supply of pistols, tossing each away when they ran out to grab a new one.
- Comically, after a barrage of derringer shots, Milly is seen picking up all of Meryl's discarded guns.
- It's a bit of a Wall Banger the way Meryl flings away her derringer after one shot, because the model she uses can fire TWO shots; undoubtedly, it's most likely a case of Did Not Do The Research.
- Or Rule Of Cool. It does make her fighting style quite unique...
- Erm, cocking a gun isn't an overly easy task: the force required is a little much for just the thumb, making it easier to fire swiftly if you use the other hand. While Meryl could just recock the gun, this would interrupt an otherwise smooth flow of draw gun, cock with free hand; draw gun with free hand, fire and discard other gun. In the time it would take her to recock the thing, she can have another one ready and maintain a higher rate of fire.
- Done in Rah Xephon during the End Of The World Special. In the ultimate futility, the thrown pistol doesn't even REACH the target!
- Barnett of Vandread Does this to at least five different weapons of the course of an episode, since she does have to keep firing constantly, or risk being overrun. However, as the end of the episode she gets very cheesed off that she can't recover the weapons, since they're incredibly rare in this time period.
- In the original Mobile Suit Gundam, Amuro had a tendency to toss away the beam rifle when it expended its ammo, but this is justified since it could only be recharged on the ship. In later series, smaller, magazine-style energy packs for the beam rifles are introduced allowing them to be reloaded on the fly & this trope becomes much less prevalent.
Comic Books
- In Gotham Central, Detective Romy Chandler blames Batman for the death of her partner, Detective Nate Patton. When she and her new partner stumble upon Batman interrogating the Penguin, she draws her gun and fires. Batman survives, but he takes her gun and vanishes from the room. Reality Ensues as the fact that a police officer has lost her gun, after shooting Batman on top of everything, becomes a matter of great concern for her and the police department at large, especially when another detective slips and accidentally mentions the theft to their captain. Thankfully, before it can spin too far out of control Robin returns the gun, passing along the message that Chandler should not shoot Batman again.
- The numerous occurrences in The Matrix are more forgivable, since the dozens of guns abandoned were conjured up from computer code, and vanish without a trace when the programmed reality is "reformatted".
- Heroic Bloodshed movies, from which The Matrix takes inspiration, have characters doing this all the time when a gun goes empty, jams up, or otherwise can't be used anymore, throwing the gun away and then grabbing another off a dead bad guy or a potted plant or a nearby table and continuing the gunfight. Many such characters carry a gym bag, suitcase, guitar case, or other big carry-all full of guns to final showdowns, whether it's launching a major assault (like in A Better Tomorrow II) or heading off a major siege (like in The Killer).
- In the recent version of Casino Royale, a bad guy throws his (empty) gun at James Bond. Bond promptly catches it and throws it back. Into his face.
- The zombie horror/comedy Undead hangs a giant neon lampshade on this. The Bad Ass never reloads, instead whipping out a fresh pair of pistols after every barrage, to the point of ridiculousness. This goes unmentioned until he spends several minutes naked, finds new clothing in a thrift store, and at the first sight of zombies, whips two desert eagles out of Hammerspace, prompting another character to ask, "Where've you been keeping them then?"
- The Cop Show variant is reversed in Akira Kurosawa's "Stray Dog", which begins with the main character reporting the theft of his sidearm , and follows his efforts to track down and recover the gun.
- Much like the Hong Kong film P.T.U.. A member of the Police Tactical Unit loses his piece during a bust, and his colleagues spend a whole evening looking for it to save him from the bureaucratic consequences he'd otherwise face when he reported it.
- In The Boondock Saints, Il Duce challenges all three saints to a firefight with six handguns. Each time a pair of handguns runs out of ammo he just drops them and pulls out another pair.
- In the opening battle at Hamunaptra in The Mummy, O'Connell fires Guns Akimbo at a number of bad guys. He runs out of bullets...then drops the pistols, draws two more from their holsters, and keeps firing. The French service revolvers he was using were loaded via a gate at the back of the cylinder, like a Colt Single Action Army revolver, requiring much more time to reload than even modern revolvers.
- Someone runs out of bullets shooting Imhotep and then throws their gun at Imhotep. Like that's any more likely to work than the actual bullets that didn't work?
- Justified in the final chase scene of The Last of the Mohicans (the 1992 film starring Daniel Day-Lewis) when Hawkeye fires, throws away and picks up rifles in succession, since these are single shot and take too long to reload.
- Parodied in the 1985 comedy/adventure film King Solomon's Mines. The female character throws a gun at the villain; he shouts: "Thank you!" and uses it to blast away at her.
- Justified twice in Unforgiven - Clyde carries three guns because he only has one hand. "I just don't wanna get killed for lack of shootin' back." In the final shootout, Will Munny throws his shotgun at Little Bill after it misfires with its second and final shot. When Bill instinctively tries to block it, doing so interferes with him drawing his pistol. By the time Bill recovers, Will Munny already has his pistol out and gets off a couple of rounds at Little Bill.
- Played straight, then lampshaded, then inverted in Grosse Pointe Blank - Martin Blank and rival hitman Grocer end up in a Mexican Standoff across a kitchen counter, only to find that they're both empty. They toss their guns away, and Grocer pulls out a fresh one while teasing Blank when it's apparent that he's all out - "So, what are you gonna do? You gonna THROW that gun at me? How 'bout this? How 'bout I sell you a piece for a hundred Gs?" Grocer tosses a loaded gun past Blank's cover and jumps out to shoot him only for Blank to smash his head with a nearby television and electrocute him.
- Jason Bourne in The Bourne Series frequently breaks apart and discards weapons he's used, including the hunting shotgun in the first film and the handgun in the third film's Waterloo Station fight.
- In Joss Whedon's original script for Alien: Ressurection, one of the smugglers was supposed to carry plastic guns that were made to be disposable. In his final Last Stand, he was supposed to eject a number of pistols from his sleeves and discard them as they ran out of ammo. None of this made it into the final film.
- Somewhat played for comedy in Versus, where the weaselly crook is always losing his pistols for various reasons, only to pull out yet another pistol from hammerspace.
- Justified in Tremors when a giant man-eating Sand Worm breaks into the basement of the Crazy Survivalist and his wife. Seizing one firearm after another from their Wall Of Weapons, they blast away at the creature which is only a few feet away — sometimes reloading, but other times tossing the gun aside and grabbing a more powerful weapon. At all other times in the movie the two show proper weapons handling.
- In The Matrix's famous lobby shootout scene, Trinity and Neo throw away guns whenever they empty a magazine. Neo apparently throws away his last pair during his fight with Agent Brown.
- The Dresden Files has Kinkaid, who claims to be a perfectly normal hired mercenary who's just very, very good at his job. In Death Masks, he produces a golf-bag full of double-barreled shotguns which he discards after firing one shell through each barrel. To be fair, said rounds are highly incendiary, and he claims that it is unsafe to shoot more than one through any given shotgun, as they tend to jam and thence to explode. Spectacularly.
- This is more or less accurate, and the reason why those round aren't used very much in real life.
- Averted in the Jerry Ahern novel The Takers when the protagonist (an action novelist and gunwriter) is told to throw down his guns, he quotes from a Western. "I won't throw down my weapons, I'll set them down."
Live Action TV
- Lampooned in an episode of Police Squad!, where both the cops and the villains throw their guns away after they run out of bullets in a shoot-out — and someone gets clonked on the head by a thrown gun, because both sides were only about six feet apart. In a different episode, once the gun-throwing starts, both sides have a large supply of empty firearms to toss.
- Bones refreshingly does this right, with Booth getting in serious trouble when he loses his gun, and even complaining about having to fill in forms for rounds fired off by Brennan.
- Farscape. Crichton throws away his second pulse pistol after it too shortly runs out of oil (bullets) in the groups escape from the Peacekeepers on Arnessk.
- Played with in an episode of DueSouth: While aboard a hijacked freighter crossing the Great Lakes Chicago cop Ray asks Mountie Benton to grab the gun of a knocked-out hijacker. Benton refuses because he isn't permitted to fire a gun in American waters, but Ray tells him "You don't have to use it, just carry it." Later, confronting another one of the hijackers, Benton disables him by throwing the same gun at his head. Ray responds, "You shoot a gun. Who in the hell throws a gun?"
- Averted by Lost: Sawyer holds onto the marshal's empty gun, which comes in handy when ammo is located. He also spends the latter part of season 3 wielding an empty gun to bluff people (with mixed success.)
- The jammed-gun variant is also averted in season 4. Keamy's gun jams (because the island won't let him kill Michael) and he gives it to Capt. Gault to fix, which he does.
- The cop losing the gun was averted in The Wire: when an injured cops gun is stolen, one of the detectives spends nearly half the season tracking it down.
- In the Firefly episode "War Stories", Zoe tells Wash "Six shots, then throw it away." as she hands him a pistol. Her husband is however inexperienced with firearms, so it would probably make more sense that teaching him to load in the short time they have.
- All versions of Star Trek are pretty bad about the losing-military-weapons version. Between standoffs, captures, and accidents, they lose a lot of phasers.
Newspaper Comics
- In Modesty Blaise, Willie "couldn't hit Venice with a pistol" but still managed to take down a bad guy with one - by throwing it.
Video Games
- The few firearms available in Dead Rising are discarded when Frank runs out of ammo. This makes sense, as you don't really have time to tote around empty guns in the middle of a Zombie Apocalypse.
- You can do this with the ray guns in the Super Smash Bros. games along with the super-scope and any other item. (In a sense, this is justified, because in this case, you really can't reload them) If you hit your opponents with them, it does damage.
- From most ranges, throwing the guns is actually faster than shooting them, and in some cases a thrown gun is more dangerous as well.
- The First Person Shooters Area 51 and The Darkness use this in one of the circumstances where it's actually a realistic response — when using Guns Akimbo. Reloading two weapons at once is clumsy at best and impossible at worst, so the empty weapon really is just dead weight. Of course, the realism of Guns Akimbo in general is specious at best.
- Although, in The Darkness, Jackie keeps hold of one pair of pistols, the custom ones that were given to him at the start of the game as a birthday present. They're always the last pair of guns he pulls out, so he must hang on to them and reload them at some point.
- All Elite/Sangheili guns save the Needler in the Halo series run from a power cell "which it is stil unknown how to recharge". This leads to swapping guns with your dead enemies as a necessity, even sifting through the bodies to find the best one.
- Condemned takes it one notch further : it's an FPS that doesn't have a reload key. Once a gun is emptied, it is promptly and automatically discarded. All guns have soldered-in magazines, as made evident by the fact that, even though you may wind up with one gun with 4 bullets in it in your inventory and another one with 3 on the ground, there is no way to top the first off with the ammo from the second. That also goes for shotguns. Thus, the CSI protagonist mostly relies on braining people with 2x4s, rebars and lead pipes.
- The sequel thankfully allows you to carry one spare firearm in a holster after completing a certain stage (But only if you complete it with a certain amount of competence - finding secrets, getting good clues, and making informative theories), and before that, you are allowed to reload your current gun with the ammunition from the weapon on the ground and in safes.
- Firearms in Dead Rising are the exact same way; they come with a preloaded amount of ammo, cannot be topped off, and are discarded upon running out. Luckily you CAN carry several fully-loaded copies of the same weapon, and the magazine capacities of these guns are fairly generous.
- Similarly, the ambitious but godawful game Trespasser had non-reloadable guns, explained by the heroine having a broken left arm. How she is able to fire an assault rifle on full auto one-handed and determine ammo count just by hefting the gun, however, is not.
- The upcoming game Mirrors Edge is a first person game with guns. Only, you can't reload them, and the game is essentially a platformer and you can't jump with them, making throwing them aside pretty much the way to go.
- What with it being released, we can verify this is not entirely so. Being a Runner (someone who, appropriate enough, runs from conflict to deliver their intel packages), using a gun is NOT the best way to play. Runners use their agility and acrobatics to fend off attack. When carrying a gun, Faith's agility is hampered, depending on the gun size and handedness. A pistol retains your use of both hands (to climb and vault) but mildly hampers your acceleration and jump. Anything larger than that, like a rifle, does kill your ability to jump and vault and wallrun, and your max running speed is completely nuked. (A M249 machine gun is worse, you're forced to walk and you jump like a Goomba, if at all.)
- One Acheivement/Trophy involves not firing a gun for the entire game. This is made extremely difficult when, for example, you're trying to avoid being killed by snipers. Normally, you'd take one out, grab his gun, and snipe the other snipers. If you're trying for this trophy...you can't do that.
- When Max Payne "reloads" his Guns Akimbo, he tosses them away and pulls out a new pair (But only in the sequel, and only when he's in the zone in bullet time). You can fire a single shot, manually reload, and repeat, and end up with a pile of slide-open pistols at Max's feet.
- What game are you playing? In both the first and second game, regardless of the situation, Max always reloads his handguns. If he's "in the zone" in MP 2, he spins around, ejecting the magazine, and stylistically reloads.
- Tequila in Stranglehold, on the other hand...
- Played straight and subverted in MDK 2 with Max the four armed dog throwing away most of this weapons once he runs out of ammo, luckily there is always a good supply of guns lying around. Subverted as Max has four weak guns with unlimited ammo which never leaves his hands, unless he dies.
- In Dead To Rights, protagonist Jack apparently dislikes reloading guns. He can max out his ammo by picking up more of the same gun, but instead of putting in a new clip, in true Hong Kong action style, he'll throw away his guns and pull out two new ones. If he's using a two-handed weapon like a shotgun or a submachine gun, he'll reload that, however. This is at least partially justified, however, as every enemy in the game will eventually shoot at him, and it's presumably easier for him to just throw away his gun and pick up another. Or violently disarm some guy and kill him with his own gun.
- Nick Kang in True Crime: Streets of L.A. can fire all guns akimbo, but throws them away at the drop of a hat; when entering a car, when entering a building, when attempting to holster. He always returns to his issue sidearms, which are also wielded akimbo, have unlimited ammo, and can get upgraded to deadly enough power to make the other guns superfluous.
- The guns in Blood Rayne just offer another variation for killing, and are discarded by Rayne as soon as they're empty, or when other guns are picked up.
- Used and subverted in Die Hard Arcade. If one of the players runs out of ammo for a gun, they'll either reload it if they have another magazine, or throw it at the enemies if they don't. Oddly enough, players can carry only two pistols (no Guns Akimbo here, though - they'll just draw the second gun when the first gun runs out) and as many magazines as they can find. Not only that, if they die, a gun falls out of their body at the continue screen.
- The gun-throwing thing gets rather annoying, however - if you have a pistol you can arrest mooks (put them in handcuffs) which is an instant kill. Why can't you keep an empty gun around to threaten mooks with?
- In Scribblenauts, any weapon you create will have 1 to 5 shots, after which Maxwell will throw them to the ground... where they then turn into a puff of smoke.
- Alex Mercer from Prototype doesn't bother holding onto reloads for the guns he pilfers from the military, tossing the firearms away instead.
- Almost justified, in that with all the marines around and his own talents, acquiring a new weapon is probably faster than reloading one. However, when you do this in disguise while infiltrating a military base, one wonders why the marines are not perturbed by Sgt. John Doe throwing his fully loaded missile launcher to the ground.
- The actual military doesn't let go of their weapons for anything. Grab a marine by the throat, run up the side of a skyscraper, and take the fall. He'll still have his gun when you land.
- Bayonetta goes through an entire casket full of guns in a single cutscene. She sticks with the final pair for the rest of the battle, and makes them have infinite ammo because she can do that.
Web Comics
- Another which appears in Dr McNinja. When the titular doctor confronts Franz Rayner, Rayner opens the battle by firing a full magazine at the Doc. When the Doc dodges all the bullets, he throws the gun- as a distraction, considering the next panel is the Doc getting punched in the face.
Web Animation
- Hank in Madness Combat tends to go through guns and ammo at an amazing rate. This never holds him up too badly, though, since he resupplies himself from slain Mooks. For some reason, he prefers to take the least-sensible weapons available - given one dead mook with an axe and another with a never-fired AK-47, he'll take the axe.
- Why does he not take the gun when given the choice between that and an axe? Because he's a BADASS, that's why.
Western Animation
- Elisa in Gargoyles had her service weapon destroyed by gargoyles/monsters/cyborgs at least 3 times, yet never suffers any on-screen reprimand for losing them, assuming she claimed they were lost. It's unlikely she told her superiors in the NYPD what was really happening to them.
- Parodied in The Venture Brothers episode "Escape to the House of Mummies, Part II". A mook throws his empty gun at Brock and is admonished by a fellow mook with "We have more bullets ya' know. You really need to stop doing that, now go get it!"
- Parodied in The Simpsons in which Comic Book Guy (playing a villain named The Collector) tries to shoot Bart (Stretch Dude) numerous times with a phaser. Bart is easily able to avoid all shots with his elasticity, but is taken down in a second when Collector throws the phaser.
- An episode of Justice League Unlimited had Wonder Woman deflecting bullets from a common mook with her bracelets. When he goes to throw the gun at her, even after seeing not a single shot hit, she sarcastically says to him, "Oh yeah...like that's gonna work."
Tabletop Games
Real Life
- Real Life example — In the days of single-shot muzzle loading ball and powder pistols, it was quite common for gunfighters to wear bandoliers of preloaded guns in order to fend off numerous foes in heated firefights. This was done in order to avoid the lethally longwinded (and unreliable) procedure of reloading one's pistols in the heat of combat.
- More modern examples were derringers like the FP-45 Liberator
 which could be produced faster than reloaded and the Deer Gun.
- The deer gun can be reloaded (very slowly) though , so it is not exactly a throw away, though it only hold 1 shot so you don't want to get into a firefight with it.
- In addition, there's the concept of the "New York Reload" — dropping one gun when it runs out of ammo and then drawing another — which is common among those who use revolvers, due to the longer reload time compared to a semiautomatic, but which is getting less frequent because of moon clips and speedloaders. New York policemen, when equipped with revolvers, used to do this - they carried a second revolver precisely so in a tense situation they could simply grab a fresh gun and drop the old one, a decisive advantage when all you have is six shots.
- This trope is subverted in Real Life by the Panzerfaust (and later anti-tank rockets like the American LAW). The weapon was literally designed to be a cheap, throwaway weapon, discarded after a single use.
- The Walther P38/P1 used by the German army from 1939 to 2000 was infamous for its complicated construction and temperamental nature. Many German soldiers described its firepower as "eight warning shots and one aimed throw."
- Instructors sent to train the Afghan National Army have reported that even supposedly experienced men were all too prone to respond to a jammed weapon by throwing it away and looking for a replacement - and running away if one was not forthcoming.
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