History Main / ShortRangeLongRangeWeapon

* There was the [[LudicrousGibs highly-grisy]] execution method of "blowing from a gun" that consisted of firing a cannon with the victim tied over the muzzle of the cannon. Performed by a number of a peoples, it's especially associated with the British's colonial rule over India since it extends the punishment "beyond death" to Hindus as the scattered remains rather prevents [[DueToTheDead cremation]]. Naturally, it's not a big problem to use a long-range cannon on a person tied directly to it rather than someone who's actively fighting against it, but this execution method actually remained a tad dangerous for those not being executed since spectators facing the mouth of the cannon could be accidentally hit by the grapeshot fired or those too near to the cannon could get struck by [[LudicrousGibs the flying bits of bone or flesh]].

* [[ThoseWackyNazis The Major]] from ''Manga/{{Hellsing}}'' does this against [[{{Bifauxnen}} Integra]] in the final volume, quoting "For the first time evah, I hit something."

* ''Manga/{{Naruto}}'' shows us a supposed Long Range Division in the Shinobi Army arc that first tries to keep their distance, without firing, and later charges (complete with the command, "Charge!") when the opponents begin to catch up. They did have capacity for artillery present.
* In ''Anime/GuiltyCrown'', GHQ personnel apparently don't understand that they don't need to be close to melee range to use their weapons...

* ''Manga/Evangelion303'': During her aerial duels against Shinji, Kaworu and Mari, Asuka got extremely close, even though her [[CoolPlane Eva]] was equipped with long-range missiles.

* Taken to a ridiculous extreme in the ''Franchise/StarWars'' prequels. Droids and clones armed with energy weapons (that, in the case of the clones, are about as tall as they are) repeatedly charge into extreme close combat. It might have something to do with both armies being lead by Jedi or Sith, who are really only skilled in melee combat, especially as the Jedi act as generals for the clone troopers and directly lead them in battle.

** Used by the kaiju themselves in Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019. Ghidorah’s [[ShockAndAwe gravity beams]] are already an absolutely devastating long-rage BreathWeapon, capable of [[NotEnoughToBury disintegrating humans and other non-kaiju targets to ash]]. During his aerial fight with [[MagmaMan Rodan]], Ghidorah’s right and left heads restrain the TerrorDactyl while the [[MultipleHeadCase middle head]] fires his gravity beam straight into Rodan’s chest [[NoRangeLikePointBlankRange at point-blank range]]. Rodan is taken out for the remainder of the fight.
* ''Film/{{Equilibrium}}'''s GunKata riffs on this idea. The Clerics (secret-police-cum-special-forces) use highly scripted movements to fight pitched gun battles at close range, full of [[PistolWhip pistol whips]] and point blank shots, with nary a scratch. The really epic scene, however, is the [[strike:knife]] gun fight near the end wherein [[spoiler: [[strike:TheDragon]] BigBad and Preston swap blows, guns in hand, barely swatting the barrel away each time.]]

* In ''Film/StarshipTroopers'', entire ''battalions'' of assault-rifle equipped troops charge up to spitting range of the bugs. Possibly, this is intentional, to emphasize the untrained nature of the troops and the nature of the military structure that produced them. This is in contrast Heinlein's original book, which has swathes of text describing the training of the Mobile Infantry explicitly point out that the soldiers are put through terrifyingly difficult training, and that by the time they are sent to fight bugs, each is a veritable grandmaster of war and death. In fact, that the humans bother training their soldiers is what sets them apart from the bugs: they just hatch more, and don't bother with any fancy prep.

* The ''VideoGame/{{Fallout}}'' series has extremely short ranges for a lot of its weapons, with basic pistols topping out at 25 meters, and the very best sniper rifles maxing out at a mere 60. This is chiefly caused by the RuleOfFun, along with isometric view not being much good beyond throwing distance - these would not be fun games if you got instantly blasted by an impossible-to-see foe with a sniper rifle as soon as you entered a raider camp, or something.

** Many weapons can now be used to hit targets way beyond throwing distance, but enemies still don't go out of their way to keep the distance in between the player and them. Some will switch to more appropriate weapons as they or the player gets close, but many will cheerfully keep using laser and sniper rifles at spitting distance. However, most weapons are rather ridiculous in terms of how much the shots spread from the point you're aiming at, keeping this trope in effect to an extent. [[JustifiedTrope Though it probably has been a while since when those weapons were made]]. However, this is even worse than you think: many weapons, the sniper rifle included, actually have an ArbitraryWeaponRange, and will deprive you of your perfectly-placed BoomHeadshot to punish you for foolishly trying to use a sniper rifle to hit someone from long range by having your bullet inexplicably disappear from the game. Worse still, the sniper rifle actually has a shorter range than an ''ad-hoc crossbow'' made at your tool bench out of a paint gun, a toy car, some medical tubing, and radscorpion venom; the best long-range weapon in the game is a lever-action rifle ''with iron sights'', because it does a lot of damage and has a spread of 0.
** Also strangely inverted as well, as the standard hunting rifle, one of the more effective long range weapons (slightly less than the sniper rifle's range) lacks iron sights entirely. This would make the weapon near impossible to aim at anything further than very close range in real life. The hunting rifle model was given proper iron sights in ''New Vegas'', which was required as that game introduced the ability to actually look down them. However, the sights added to the hunting rifle – both the default iron sights and the optional scope – are unfortunately off-center (almost all of the returning weapons from ''3'' have wonky or otherwise barely-usable sights because they weren't designed for actually using them, or modified to fit the game that lets you).

This may be because extremely long-range fights don't look [[RuleOfCool as exciting]]. Watch a Website/YouTube video from coalition forces in the Iraq war or in Afghanistan and notice how rarely you can even see the enemy apart from the occasional muzzle flash. That being said, in many cases, [[RealityIsUnrealistic effective range is only a tiny fraction of a weapon's maximum range]] due to visibility, concealment, battle stress, and suppression fire. It's hard to be accurate at a kilometer even if your weapon can reach out that far, unless you have plenty of time to aim.

In a nonmilitary context, this is pretty much TruthInTelevision. Based on various law enforcement agency data, [[https://www.luckygunner.com/lounge/the-true-distance-of-a-typical-gunfight/ the vast majority]] of fatal shootings involving civilian-on-civilian and cop-on-civilian violence in the United States take place under 15 meters (with the FBI citing 3 meters as typical), despite even handguns, shotguns, and submachine guns on full auto typically all having a 25-50 meter effective range, with rifles having ranges of several hundred. There are various reasons for this, ranging from a lot of these instances being point-blank ambushes, to untrained or lightly trained shooters (civilians and police) often having their alreaay-unimpressive accuracy to to dirt during stressful situations, to police trying to deescelate situations by getting close enough to speak to suspects, to some of those civilian-on-civilian incidents being preceded by verbal arguments.

* ''Anime/CodeGeass'' is so guilty of this trope it's not even funny. Most ranged combat happens within two arms' lengths (allowing those SuperPrototype mecha to dogfight around each other and exchange melee blows and gunfire in equal measure while reducing those hapless machine-gun wielding {{mooks}} into decorations), and missiles or ''battleship cannons'' aren't used at anything over a few hundred metres worth of distance. Even if we accept that some side effect of the universe's SchizoTech meant that targeting systems never evolved beyond the 'binoculars' stage, it's still bloody ludicrous.
** The {{Red Shirt}}s and {{Mook}}s tend to fight at long range, however when even the ''main characters'' (looking at you Suzaku) seem to have graduated from the ImperialStormtrooperMarksmanshipAcademy getting in close is ''required''.
* ''Anime/HeavyMetalLGaim'': This series was pretty bad with this. In many fights the enemy mechas tried to get close to L-Gaim instead of keeping shooting afar. Sometimes it was justified, though: both mechas were sword-fighting, and one of them suddenly whipped its rifle out to catch its enemy off guard with a quick point-black shot. And in episode 12 Daba got to get ''extremely'' close to shoot his enemy at blank point range because otherwise the mecha's energy barrier would deflect the projectile.

* ''Anime/MazingerZ'': This series mostly averted the trope. Usually both the [[{{Robeast}} Mechanical Beasts]] equipped with long range weapons (beams, bolts, missile launchers, machine guns) and Mazinger-Z avoided getting close to each other more often than they had to. Some Beasts even made a point of this (Jenova M9 was a robotical sniper. Closing with the enemy would be the last thing it would do). There were exceptions: Sometimes Beasts got over-confident and got close (like Kingdam X10. When Mazinger ''apparently'' ran out of power and fell face-down, Kingdam dissipated its mirage trick and approached to skewer it with its sword instead of continuing to blast the robot with lightning bolts. Bad idea). And in the original manga, Kouji prefered fighting with punches and kicks, using his robot's long-range weapons to finish their enemies off.

* In ''Anime/GuiltyCrown'', GHQ personnel apparently don't understand that they don't need to be close to melee-range to use their weapons...

* Played horribly straight in ''VideoGame/DevilMayCry3DantesAwakening'' with the Kalina Ann rocket launcher, which has projectiles that automatically detonate a short ways from him even if there are no enemies in range.

* Averted in ''LightNovel/StarshipOperators''. The range of fighting in the anime is really far.

* In ''Series/FearTheWalkingDead'' Morgan demonstrates his akido skills by using a staff to disarm a pistol=packing woman. If she had stepped back two feet she could easily blown a hole in him before he reached her.

* In one episode of ''Series/PersonOfInterest'', John Reese goes up against an ageing [[https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/UsefulNotes/TheStasi Stasi]] agent who's spent the whole episode tracking down his own former teammates then torturing them for information before murdering them. You'd think that Reese, an ex-CIA and Special Forces agent, would grasp the danger, the need for caution, ''and'' the way to use distance to his advantage when going up against the guy. Indeed, Reese gets him at gunpoint... and then slowly closes to melee range, allowing the man to easily knock him out, tie him up, torture him for information, and very nearly kill him.[[note]]Given Reese's suicidal and self-harming tendencies, which have been evident since the pilot episode, this may have been on purpose (consciously or subconsciously); the agent's backstory hit close to home, and Reese may have felt like he deserved such a fate.[[/note]][[/folder]]