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Look out! He's got a showerhead!

With ABC deleting dynamite gags from cartoons, do you find that your children are using explosives less frequently?
Mark LoPresti

"Don't move a muscle, or we will shoot you with our invisible guns!"
Yu-Gi-Oh The Abridged Series

In an example of the nerfing of violence, almost all firearms in animated cartoons made since the late 1970s or early 1980s, if they appear at all, will be radically different from real guns, either in form or in function. Sometimes it's explained. Mostly it's not. The name of the trope comes from the fact that most of these use some form of energy principle.

Several reasons for this have been theorized:
  • Changes in American gun culture, akin to those that made things like smoking an increasingly rare phenomenon in American media.
  • Imitability. Shooting someone with a bullet is an imitable act which might result in negative publicity, but a kid can't find his Dad's laser rifle and zapfry his buddy. Yet.
  • Higher leeway on how much damage it deals and how it is portrayed. It is easy to accept an action hero getting blasted away by an energy beam and then jumping back to his feet, but if he got shot with a bullet, then we'd have to deal with the fact that he has a physical object lodged in his chest -or if the bullet were sufficiently powerful, that he has part of his chest lodged in a physical object behind him.

Note that this is usually limited to bullet-firing weapons. More destructive weapons like RPG's may still be seen in cartoons, despite (or perhaps because of) the increased difficulty in obtaining them. In rare cases, a cartoon will have large guns fire actual bullets, but still no realistic small arms.

This trope manifests in several ways:
  • When characters who would be expected to own guns — such as policemen — don't have them, or don't use them in cases which they would be expected to do so.
  • When most or all of the guns in a particular universe are energy-based or use abnormal ammo, regardless of the owner or the universe's particular technological level.
  • When a firearm looks and acts like a real firearm, even including parts which make sense for bullets but not for lasers, but whose ordnance still looks or sounds like lasers. Inversely, when an unrealistic-looking gun fires actual bullets.
  • When a cartoon which previously featured realistic guns is altered to make them less realistic, or eliminates them altogether.

This philosophy has sometimes extended to cartoons from previous decades or those imported from other countries. In general, most production houses have (under pressure from various Media Watchdogs who believed cartoon violence stimulated real violence) eliminated or altered anything and everything that looked like a real gun from their cartoons. Similarly, networks have gone back and Bowdlerized classic cartoons to remove firing guns and, in some cases, casual use of explosives. The reasoning behind these sometimes bizarre substitutions seems to be the belief that if it doesn't look like a real weapon, the poor child's psyche won't be warped and he won't have the desire to use a real weapon on someone else.

This trope is a fairly cyclical one, with guns going from "acceptable" to "not acceptable" and back again in the span of a handful of years, and sometimes within the same show. Whether or not it appears also depends greatly on a particular show's creator and how willing he or she is to fight for realism.

Beware, censors, if laser beam weaponry ever becomes a reality, you're kind of screwed.

See also Abnormal Ammo, Trick Arrow, Inverse Law Of Sharpness And Accuracy.

A Sub Trope of Ray Gun.


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