Blasting It Out of Their Hands

Pretty quick draw, am I right?

"Well, don't just stand there looking stupid, grasping your hands in pain. How about a round of applause for The Waco Kid?"

— Bart, Blazing Saddles

A character shoots a weapon out of another's hand, or shoots their hand in order to force them to drop the weapon.

The one on the receiving end on this trope almost never gets hurt past a brief scream.^note Although in particularly more violent works the poor schmuck gets a case of Fingore instead. Indeed, this technique is often used by heroic gunslingers (who may have an aversion to just shooting the enemy) to subdue their enemies without killing them, and to establish their skill with a gun in a flashy and awesome way. It's sometimes used as well in family-friendly works that go out of their way to ensure no characters are ever killed. In fantasy and Period Piece stories, it may be done with a bow and arrow or crossbow. In science fiction, it may be done with a laser blaster.

Sometimes, however, they were aiming for something else.

In the case of the gun being shot (not the target's hand), if the gun is somehow still usable despite having been hit by a slug of lead and copper traveling in excess of 800 feet per second, then it's a case of Magic Bullets. Otherwise, Weapons Breaking Weapons will apply.

Truth in Television, although this isn't a common practice given how it's much easier to simply aim for centre mass (i.e. the target's torso). After all, the hand is a much smaller target than even the head, and depending on the situation may be moving around much more rapidly and unpredictably. Miss the shooter's hand or their gun, and they've still got a weapon they can use to shoot back at you — plus, that bullet you fired will now hit whatever (or, worse, whoever) is behind your target. Police and military snipers have been known to shoot at the firearms of their targets on occasion.

Not to be confused with an Arm Cannon or Blasting Time. Often an example of Improbable Aiming Skills. For the version involving melee weapons, see Melee Disarming.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In Cowboy Bebop:
  • During a gunfight in "Sympathy for the Devil", Wen shoots Spike's gun out of his hands. Spike retrieves the gun, then shoots Wen's gun out of his hands.
  • In "Waltz for Venus", Faye does it to some thugs at a Bad Guy Bar.
  • Mad Pierrot, superhuman floating hitman clown, does it to Spike in "Pierrot le Fou".
• Nadie from El Cazador de la Bruja seems to do this exclusively.
• The Rose of Versailles shows Oscar subvert this, because she's actually pissed at the guy, so she shoots his hand, making sure that he'll never get to shoot again (she had seen him shoot a child in the back just for kicks).
• Deconstructed in Gunsmith Cats: Rally Vincent's trademark move is to shoot off an opponent's thumb or trigger finger instead of merely shooting the gun out of their hands. And if that's not enough she also tends to use her encyclopedic knowledge of firearms and Improbable Aiming Skills to target the one spot that would disable her opponent's weapon without necessarily knocking it out of their hands, often with catastrophic results. (Rally tends to be stalked by vengeful amputees for some reason.) She did shoot a gun out of an enemy's hand on a single memorable occasion (the guy immediately caught it in his other hand!), but it is shown to take multiple shots — she didn't have a license at the time and didn't want the cops to find a guy (albeit a sociopathic drug dealer) she'd shot.
• City Hunter's Ryo Saeba is especially proficient at this - his skills are so good he can squarely hit the gun without even scratching the hand holding it. This is part of the realistic treatment of gun tropes in this series, as not only is the hand of the perp unable to hold anything due the sheer pain, but when he doesn't aim for the gun he gets very different results - in one occasion he shot off the ring (not the ring finger, the ring on the finger, because he's that good) of the perp because the gun was his and didn't want to ruin it, and the small .38 Special bullet hitting the ring was enough to make the crook cry in pain; in another he shot his opponent in his dominant hand, and when this guy showed up again he was now dominant with the other hand because the shot one was crippled.
  • He gets to do it as well in the latest OVA, City Hunter: Shinjuku Private Eyes. On four mooks in a matter of seconds no less.
• Death Note:
  • Exception: Near the end of the series, Matsuda shoots a pen out of Light's hand to prevent him from writing Near's name in the Death Note. Light is bleeding badly from the shot, but continues writing Near's name with the blood from the gunshot wound. Matsuda is forced to shoot him a second time (then several more times), leaving Light crawling pathetically on the floor.
  • Matsuda also does this to two mafia members when the team raids Mello's hideout.
  • Watari does this to Higuchi, and Higuchi does appear to be completely unharmed, though bereft of gun.
  • In a variation of this, in the second movie, Matsuda instead shoots the watch (that contained the Death Note) off Light's arm. Though he still hit Light's wrist: Light is bleeding pretty badly from it afterward.
• A royal guard uses an old-fashioned gun to shoot a magic wand out of a mage's hand in The Familiar of Zero.
• Trigun:
  • This occurs so frequently that it's practically Vash's standard technique. Sometimes justified in that he's not human and has lived long enough to develop that kind of skill, although some of his feats still seem implausible from a physics standpoint.
  • It's taken to such an extreme, he later uses the machine gun in his artificial arm to blast his own out-of-control Angel Arm, so it fires straight up into the sky rather than at another guy within the city.
  • Meryl Stryfe manages to impress during a hostage situation by disarming several cops — with quick draw reflexes and a crapload of derringers.
• Rushuna Tendou from Grenadier is a master of this technique.
• Speed Racer knocked a gun out of someone's hand by throwing a sword at it.
• Noir. On two separate occasions Kirika saves Mireille's life by shooting a knife blade in half.
• Madlax, the spiritual sequel to Noir, has this happen alarmingly often. The title Madlax blasts a sniper rifle out of her chief antagonist's hand with a precise shot, disarming her and getting her to surrender. Later on, in episode 16, after Madlax kills upwards of twelve soldiers in twenty seconds after swinging from a rope, blasting madly with her pistols, running from cover to cover while shooting amazingly precisely... she has her gun shot out of her hand while shooting from behind cover.
• Natsuki does this twice in My-HiME: first, when fighting the Searrs army to help Mai and Mikoto make a getaway; and later to shoot Mikoto's sword out of her hands to snap her out of her mind-control state and stop her from hurting Mai.
• Quite a standard procedure of disabling criminals in Black Cat if not shoot on non-threatening area. Given that even normal characters in the manga has a damn good aim (don't even talk about characters that virtually have superpowers like the Chronos numbers), it's not going to harm the shootee that much at all.
• This happens to Barry the Chopper in the Fullmetal Alchemist manga. It does little harm to him, as he's a walking suit of armor, and it was probably unnecessary, as the person he was attacking was also a walking suit of armor. He still has the hole in his hand from it later, and comments on it.
• Teana manages to do the "down the barrel" variation on Wendi's BFG in Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha Striker S, causing the energy building up inside it to prematurely explode, cancelling all the energy shots Wendi had prepared and stunning her long enough to leave her wide open for the finishing blow.
• Black Lagoon
  • Balalaika gets a sniper to blow out Hansel's kneecap when he refuses to kneel before her. He tries to retaliate by hurling his axe at her, whereupon the sniper blows his hand off.
  • In "Roberta's Blood Trail", Balalaika has her snipers shoot the weapons from three Action Girls. Two Hands is noticeably pissed, given her liking for Guns Akimbo means she's now useless until the wounds heal.
• Villain-on-Hero example in Transformers: Armada: Jetfire tries to help Optimus with a particularly difficult fight, but Demolishor grabs his legs and drags him down, Jetfire turns to shoot him, but Wheeljack blasts the gun out of his hand. Cyclonus shows up and poor Jetfire ends up stuck under a pile of Decepticons while Optimus is shot and killed by a newly-completed Wave-Motion Gun. Ouch.
• Gundam:
  • The Mobile Suit Gundam SEED series borderlines ridiculousness with this, although for a completely different reason. The main character can fire his beam rifle in slew along with all of his other weapons AT ONCE and disarm everyone within his visible range within the span of a few seconds or minutes. The mobile suits themselves won't be hurt much due to their protection from Phase Shift armor but damn... That's just Improbable Aiming Skills. Though it's slightly more probable in that he's shooting off the mobile suits entire arms (and not always cleanly at the shoulder joint at that) and not their precise weapons, though he occasionally gets those as well, but it also typically blows up the entire rifle instead of merely blasting it out of their hand. Since cockpits are in the chest, the pilots aren't harmed. It's also worth noting this happens to Kira himself in nearly every important battle with an enemy ace, that his beam rifle is destroyed, causing him to need to use his sabers.
    • Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny gives us two traditional examples, both involving Athrun; first when Rey tries to shoot him with a rifle as he attempts to defect and second when Meer tries to shoot Lacus with a pistol. Both instances Athrun disarms them with the same weapon they were firing.
  • Averted in Mobile Suit Gundam 00. The Gadessa's bazooka proved to be so large that it doesn't take a lot of skill to disarm him since it is almost as big as the main suit.
  • In fact this is common in many Gundam shows, as it's a typical way to force main characters into more visually impressive melee battles, and to build tension in combat and make the hero look not so invincible without causing significant damage to the Gundam's that will require them to be down for repairs (as they have plenty of spare rifles ready for the next episode). As mentioned above this is slightly more plausible than the human variation because the Gundam rifles are bigger targets and typically a hit anywhere, even just a graze will ruin the weapon (or worse cause it to explode, forcing the pilot to toss it clear) plus mobile suits have computer assisted targeting, so it doesn't require quite as improbably precise aim as the human variation.
• Gunslinger Girl. Cyborg girl Petra fires a bullet that severs both a terrorist's finger and the key of a nuclear detonator he was about to turn.
• In Cat Planet Cuties, thanks to the use of anti-matter bullets that don't affect organic material, a hostage situation is quickly defused by shooting and vaporizing the gun in the shooter's hand.
• Lupin III: Lupin and Jigen are commonly shown with the ability to do this. Usually with a bit of Quick Draw thrown in, and excellent examples in the TV specials.
• Lupin III: Dead or Alive:
  • Olèander does this to Jigen and Lupin before revealing her identity to them.
  • When three cops tried to arrest Inspector Zenigata, he defeated the last one by shooting the gun out of his hand.
  • Pannish does a variation on this against Crisis during the climax, shooting down the barrel of Crisis's golden gun, making it explode.
• The HAL arc of the Majin Tantei Nougami Neuro anime has Neuro do this to a bunch of Brainwashed and Crazy gunslingers by sending their own bullets back at them. Deconstructed when the leader of the group is shown bleeding profusely from both hands. At the end of the arc, he's shown again with both hands bandaged up.
• In Episode 44 of Tegami Bachi: Letter Bee, Lawrence, leader of Reverse uses his pistol to shoot Lag's Shindanjuu(a gun that fires Shindan, or heart bullets) out of his hand. Lawrence presumably didn't want to harm Lag, whom he saw as a potential recruit for Reverse, even though he believed that Lag's current doubts would prevent him from firing a Shindan. Lag then delivers a Shut Up, Hannibal!, pulls Gauche's Shindanjuu out of his bag and fires a powerful Shindan at Cabernet.
• Expelled from Paradise: When a thug attacks Angela Balzac with a knive, Dingo shoots it out of his hand.
• Moriarty the Patriot: Moran accomplishes this for Team Moriarty in The Phantom of Whitechapel, shooting Sniper Rifles out of the hands of the police and the vigilantes alike, leading Jack to proudly declare to himself that their sniper was better.

Audio Plays

• On We're Alive, Burt uses Shirley to disable Bill's shotgun in chapter 4.

Comic Books

• Used in more or less every single western comic book in the '60s. If the writers were feeling edgy enough, the hero might occasionally shoot the villain in the hand or shoulder, but because of The Comics Code of the time, shots intended to kill or seriously harm were a big no-no.
• Batman:
  • The Caped Crusader does this, but not with a gun, since he's gun-adverse and his enemies certainly aren't. A thug lifts his tommy gun, levels it at Batman, then *pang* it's knocked out of his hand by a well-aimed batarang. Occasionally they'll get to do some A-Team Firing first.
  • In Under The Red Hood (both the comics storyarc, and The Movie) The Red Hood shoots a lit Molotov Cocktail out of a thugs hand, with predictable results.
• Subverted in Deadshot's backstory. When he was just of child, Deadshot's mother had convinced his older brother (whom he looked up to) to kill his father. Deadshot climbed a tree and intended to shoot the gun out of his brother's hands (even as a kid, he was incredibly accurate). Unfortunately, the branch he was on cracked, and he accidentally killed his brother (who was really the only person he cared about), saving his father (who he hated). Later, when he pretended to be a hero and brought down criminals in order to secretly take over their organizations, he would shoot guns out of their hands. In public, anyway.
• Lucky Luke shoots faster than his shadow, and he's disturbingly accurate too.
  • He can shoot your gun, your gun's firing pin, or your trigger finger if you piss him off too much — and he can do it with his bullet bouncing off half a dozen times first so he has to aim at where the gun will be, not where it is when he shoots! And true to legend, the target will be hit before Lucky Luke's shadow has time to draw his gun!
  • He's been known to disarm four out-of-sight bandits with one bullet, due to the utter predictability of those four bandits and their tendency to be side-by-side in height order. Once you've seen that, Lucky Luke shooting a gun out of a bandit's hand while also making it shoot so you can disarm another bandit is starting to be predictable...
  • Once, when Luke trains a spectacularly incompetent shooter, that shooter manages to shoot his own gun out of his own hands. Without the bullet bouncing first!!
  • A variation: Once, when armed only with a one-shot Little Useless Gun, Luke disarms a villain by firing the bullet into the barrel of his opponent's revolver, blocking it so that the gun blows up when the man returns fire.
  • In Tortillas for the Daltons, one gunfight starts with the narrator telling us Luke's shooting becomes quite deadly...
    Bandito 1: ¡Ay! ¡Mi revolver!
    Bandito 2: ¡Ay! ¡Mi revolver's hammer!
    Bandito 3: ¡Ay! ¡The finger I use to shoot mi revolver!
    Bandito 4: ¡Ay! ¡The tequila reserve!
  • Of course Luke does it in most animated adaptations, including Daisy Town, Ballad of the Daltons, Lucky Luke (1983/1991), The New Adventures of Lucky Luke and Go West!.
• In The Spectacular Spider-Man, during a Hostage Situation, Heroic Bystander John Jameson snatches a laser rifle from one of Green Goblin's mooks, only to have it shot out of his hands. In this case, Jameson is noticably hurt by the impact, rubbing his wrists after dropping the gun.
• Done in Y: The Last Man when Hero shoots Toyota's sword in half — although she was aiming for her head.
  "Rock beats scissors, bitch."
• During the late eighties, Hawkeye ''killed'' supervillain Egghead this way — he shot an arrow down the barrel of his opponent's energy weapon to prevent Egghead from shooting Hank Pym in the back. Just as Egghead pulled the trigger, the arrow lodged itself in the barrel in the path of the discharge, resulting in a fatal explosion.
  • Hawkeye was mortified at the result (Avengers #230, splash page): "Hank, you gotta be kidding! Egghead was all set to shoot you — I only shot to disarm him! He can't be dead!"
• Green Arrow: Green Arrow and the multi-ethnic Arrow family regularly pull this off, being archers.
  • Red Arrow (formerly Arsenal, formerly Speedy) also uses guns, darts, shuriken, and so forth.
  • With his pacifistic bent and Improbable Aiming Skills, Conner Hawke (the second Green Arrow) has been known to "disarm" a villain by firing an arrow down the gun barrel.
  • In The Flash (1959) #217, as part of O'Neil and Adams' Green Lantern/Green Arrow saga, Ollie tries to do this to a sniper, but due to a shoulder injury, he misses and kills him.
• In the DC Comics miniseries Thriller, Salvo was a former mercenary soldier and member of the U.S. Marines' rapid Deployment Force. After mistakenly killing an innocent man, Salvo vowed to never again shoot to kill. He would instead only wound his targets.
• Sin City
  • Averted in The Big Fat Kill when Miho throws a shuriken and lops off Jackie-Boy's hand instead of simply knocking the gun out. Considering she can slice a cigarette in half with her throwing stars without causing harm to the person smoking, it shows that she can perform this trick but chose not to.
  • After she's had her fun, though, she does jam Jackie Boy's gun by throwing a needle right down the barrel. Like in the Hawkeye example above, Dwight warns Jack to just drop it, but Jack, somewhat delirious from the loss of his hand as well as being too drunk and pissed off to listen to reason, fires. The slide shoots right off and buries itself in his forehead, before Miho puts him out of his misery.
• In Lady Mechanika #2, Mechanika guns down Commander Winter's men and then shoots Winter through her hand as Winter attempts to draw her own pistol (Winter seems to lose a couple of fingers as a result). Mechanika spared Winter because she owed her a life debt. By sparing her when she have could have killed her, Mechanika considers the debt paid.
• A Dynamite Comics series routinely depicts The Lone Ranger's bullets going through the target's hands. This maintains the Lone Ranger's prohibition against killing, while realistically portraying the injury that results. In this case, it is an example of Improbable Aiming Skills.
• Spoofed by MAD and their parody of The Lone Ranger.
  Bandit #1: OOH! He got me on the edge of my shoulder just enough to drop my gun!
  Bandit #2: OWW! He tipped the point of my head just enough to knock me out!
  Bandit #3: EEEE! He got the mechanism in my gun just enough so's it won't shoot!
  Bandit #4: AY! He nicked the end of my trigger finger so's I can't fire!
• It's shown in Global Frequency what happens when you do this with a shotgun at close range- the guy's forearm disappears.
• Subverted in the first issue of Blood Syndicate. A reporter sees Tech-9 shoot the guns out of some bad guys' hands, and invokes the trope ("Like something out of an old cowboy movie!") Seconds later she sees that the bad guys' hands are ridiculously worse for the wear — one of them lost all his fingers in the bargain, the other lost both of his hands. And it wasn't an accident, Tech always shoots to kill or maim.
• Deconstructed in an early Judge Dredd story during Dredd's tour as marshall of Luna-1. Dredd shoots a Sov judge's gun out of his hand when two of them attempt to execute a murderer outside their jurisdiction. Dredd succeeds in disarming the Sov judge in this manner, but the shot richochets off the gun and kills the other Sov judge, leading to war between Luna-1 and East Meg 1. At this point in the strip, war is reduced to a sport fought between two teams of soldiers, so it's not as bad as full scale war.
• Tex Willer: Zig-zagged. Disarming shots on an enemy wielding a revolver are invariably delivered to the hand, and the target ends up temporarily, if not permanently, crippled. On the other hand, a hostile wielding a long gun gets the gun itself shot out of his grasp, which makes sense considering it's a significantly bigger target than a revolver.
• In Cavewoman: Starship Blish #1, Meriem knocks a fazer out of the hands of one of the starship crew with a thrown knife.
• Star Wars: Tag & Bink: Disguised as a guard on Jabba's sail barge, Bink attempts to shoot Luke's lightsaber out of his hand to prevent him from causing any more accidents due to his sloppy lightsaber-wielding after Tag (who is disguised as Boba Fett) ends up in the Sarlacc pit. Instead, he ends up shooting through Luke's (cybernetic) hand.
• Wonder Woman Vol 1: Steve Trevor shoots ray guns, a pistol and a few less ranged weapons out of villains' hands.
• Barracuda: In "Scars", Scudd sees a pirate about to throw a knife into Raffy's back and shoots the knife out of the blackguard's hand. The pirate loses several fingers along with the knife.
• Superman:
  • In Strangers at the Heart's Core, Supergirl unleashes her heat vision to shoot several rayguns out of three alien criminal's hands.
  • The Girl with the X-Ray Mind: After gaining powers, Lex Luthor breaks out of his cell but he is intercepted right away by a bunch of prison guards. Quickly, he uses his heat vision on their guns, forcing the guards to drop them.
    Lex Luthor: Watch, I'll use my heat vision on your puny weapons!
    Guard: One glance and he melted our machine-guns into scrap metal!
  • In The Strange Revenge of Lena Luthor, Subverted. Supergirl tries to blast Blackrock's power-stone out of his hands with a gust of precisely-aimed Super-Breath, but he blocks it with his own stone's energy blast.
    Blackrock: If you're planning on confiscating my power-stone, though— by blasting it out of my hands with a super-lungful of air— I'd try another tack, if I were you!
  • In Day of the Dollmaker, the titular villain draws a pair of scissors to defend himself from Supergirl, but Kara's eye blasts melt its improvised weapon out of his hand.
  • The K-Metal from Krypton: Variant. When Lois notices Gordon's henchman "Crusher" is drawing his gun to kill her and Bronson, she quickly grabs and hurls a vase, hitting his hand and forcing him to drop his weapon.
  • "The Super Dog from Krypton": Variant. When a couple of thieves shoot Krypto, Clark Kent notices the bullets are ricocheting towards him, so he subtly raises his hand and deflects the bullets back towards the crooks, knocking the guns out of their hands.

Comic Strips

• The Phantom: The Phantom's favorite tactic against gun-armed enemies is Blasting It Out of Their Hands. It never seems to do them much damage — on the order of "Ow, that hurt!" He also does it once with a thrown harpoon formerly from a harpoon gun.

Fan Works

• Boldores and Boomsticks: Butch starts to monologue about Team Rocket's new, super-strong Pokéballs that can steal Pokémon from trainers before Ruby shoots the one he was holding.
• In the Jackie Chan Adventures and W.I.T.C.H. (2004) crossover Kage, Jade uses her new Ninja Shadowkhan abilities to make two of her enemies drop their weapons by throwing shuriken at their hands, injuring them only enough to cause superficial scratches.
• In Origins, a Mass Effect/Star Wars/Borderlands/Halo Massive Multiplayer Crossover, Garrus Vakarian has this done to him, and it's part of the reason he, Maya, Athena, Axton, and Tannis are captured.
• In the Death Note Yaoi doujinshi Pink Sniper, Mello shoots a Sony PSP out of Matt's hands, because Mello is angry that Matt is paying attention to the game and not to him. Played with in that Mello blasts it in half rather than shoot it out of his hands.

Film — Animation

• An American Tail: Fievel Goes West
  • In Fievel's opening fantasy, all of his gun shots blast the guns out of the cat gang's hands. Since this is a G-rated movie, they obviously couldn't show him actually shooting anyone... Plus, that's a fantasy. A little kid like Fievel would fantasize himself doing something impossibly heroic.
  • It's played straight (using a slingshot instead of a gun) later on, when a pair of scissors is shot out of the Big Bad's hands as he's starting to cut the ribbon holding his giant mousetrap open.
  • Used again a little later when one of the Mooks shoots Tiger's slingshot out of his hand. Then he shoots it several more times while it's in the air for good measure.
• Batman: Bad Blood: Batman is brainwashed and wields a gun. He manages to fight off the effect and shoots Talia's sword before she can stab Nightwing in the back.
• Wolfwalkers: In the climax, Robyn uses her father's crossbow to shoot the Lord Protector's pistol out of his hand before he can shoot her father's unconscious body with it.

Film — Live-Action

• Ninety Seven Aces Go Places, an action-comedy starring Tony Leung Chiu-wai, have Leung's character, the "drunk gunman" frequently shooting mooks' guns out of their hands during shootouts. He needs to chug whiskey before and after each shootout, though.
• Against All Flags: When the sailing master attempt to cheat by breaking a rum bottle over Hawke's head during their duel, Spitfire shoots the bottle and shatters it while it is still in his hand.
• Army of Darkness: Ash fires a shotgun at a man with a sword. The sword breaks in two where he shot it. And then he announces the superior quality of his weaponry.
• In Beyond Sherwood Forest, Robin Hood fires a Multi Shot to simultaneously knock the crossbows out of the hands of two of the guards on the tax wagon.
• Happens in Black Hawk Down. One Ranger is hit by a stray bullet, losing his weapon and a finger in the process. That would be Scott Galentine, who lost his thumb in the real life incident the movie is based on. Just like the movie, it was preserved (sewn into his skin), his hand was bandaged and taped, and he picked up his rifle and continued firing.
• The Black Hole. When our heroes first enter the Cygnus with their laser guns at the ready, an unseen security system destroys the guns in their hands and those of the Tin-Can Robot. This accuracy proves a stark contrast to the poor aim of the security androids later on.
• Spoofed in Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles when the Waco Kid (Gene Wilder), who is sitting on his horse with his arms crossed, shoots the guns out of the hands of seven men like an impossibly accurate machine gun the instant the camera cuts away from him. When the camera cuts back to him afterwards he's still just sitting there with his arms crossed; only this time his guns are smoking in their holsters.
  Sheriff Bart: "Well, don't just stand there looking stupid and holding your hands in pain. How 'bout a little (Dramatic Gun Cock) applause for the Waco Kid?"
• Taken up a notch (and doubly subverted) by Jackie Chan in City Hunter. Ryo Saeba shoots a gun out of the villain's hand, and then wastes ammo shooting it in midair. At which point, the villain picks up the gun, only to discover that the trigger is missing and the rest of the gun is presumably irreparably damaged as well.
• In City Hunter: The Cupid's Perfume, Ryo shoots a bad guy's gun through a concrete wall, by firing again and again at the same spot until the last bullet punches through.
• At the end of Curse of the Crimson Altar, Professor Walsh shoots Morley in the hand to force him to drop the poniard.
• In Curse of the Undead, Robey shoots a gun out of the hand of one of Buffer's henchmen, despite the henchman having the drop on him. Of course, being shot doesn't actually bother Robey.
• In Death Rides a Horse, one of Cavanaugh's bouncers shoots the glass out of the hand of the barred patron Bill brings into the saloon. Bill returns the favour by shooting the gun out of his hand.
• In Deewaar, when Vijay steals the gold back from Samant's men, one of them takes a shot at him. Vijay retaliates by shooting the man's hand and warns that he won't be aiming there next time.
• In the opening scene of Draw!, Holland demonstrates his skill with a gun by blasting a stick out the hand of a young boy who is sneaking up on him. He later blasts the gun out of Reggie's hand during the shootout in Bell City. It becomes a Running Gag when Reggie tries to hold Starret at gunpoint, only to have Starret shoot the gun out of his hand.
• Faster: When Driver kicks open the door of Old Guy's apartment, Old Guy grabs a pair of scissors to defend himself. Driver shoots the scissors out of his hand.
• The Fastest Gun Alive: When Swope is about to shoot Brian Tibbs, the saloon keeper, Harold shoots the gun out of his hand.
• In A Fistful of Dollars the Man With No Name does this at one point. Not that he's got any problem with gunning down his enemies in cold blood; he just likes to show off.
• During the final showdown in Forty Guns, Giff shoots Brockie's pistol at of his hand. He then proceeds to gun down the now unarmed Brockie.
• God's Gun: During their final showdown, Lewis shoots Clayton's gun out if his hand,then shoots it several more times while it is in the air.
• The Gunfight at Dodge City: When Bat goes to stop the cowboys from Firing in the Air a Lot, one of them draws on him. Bat shoots him in the arm—forcing him to drop his gun—and then warns the other cowboys that he still has five bullets left and that his aim might get worse the more he has to shoot. They back down.
• At the end of Gunless, Jack the blacksmith saves Sean's life by blasting Ben Cutter's gun out of his hand as he is about to shoot Sean.
• Hangman's Knot: On hearing the Union captain's empty pistol click, Jamie spins and shoots the gun out of hand. He later repeats the trick when Rolph attempts to draw on the Major.
• Hannie Caulder: When Emmett attempts to throw a knife into Hannie's back, he is thwarted by the Preacher, who shoots it from his hand.
• In the John Woo movie Hard Boiled, the character Mad Dog does this to Johnny Wong in order to stop Johnny's psychotic massacre of a bunch of patients standing between him and Alan with a Mini-Uzi, just before calling him on his actions. Even though this gets him killed for his trouble, it is a great moment for Mad Dog.
• Invitation to a Gunfighter: When Jules forces Brewster to Kneel Before Zod, The Sheriff starts to draw on him from behind. Jules spins and shoots the gun out of the sheriff's hand—leaving his hand injured—because he respects him. The same is not true of Crane, the next man to draw on him, and Jules shoots him dead. No one else tries to draw after that.
• I Shot Jesse James: During John Kelley's Bar Brawl with the two con men, one of them pulls a gun on Kelley. Robert Ford proceeds to shoot the gun out of his hands, before lambasting the man for trying to shoot a man In the Back. Given how Ford had killed a man the same way years ago, it shows just how much Bob has changed.
• Jigsaw has the police force do this to a trigger Edgar is holding in his hand. He does get it shot out of his hand after he triggered a duplicate trap recreated ten years later, but Logan shoots him in the chest from a separate rooftop.
• The Living Daylights: Based on the story below. The woman in question is injured, but the wound is not serious. The rifle itself is also shown to be damaged. Bond later uses his knowledge of the wound (and its source) to get her to trust him. In this case, he justifies wounding as "I only kill professionals. That woman didn't know one end of a rifle from another."
• Lone Hero: In their final Showdown at High Noon, John disarms Bart by shooting him in the arm; much to Bart's surprise because he thought he had done enough to goad John into killing him.
• As Julia and Pete are fighting over the canteen in Lust for Gold, Walz shoots it out of their hands.
• In The Magnificent Seven, a bunch of racists blocking the burial of an Indian are disabled this way. It's mostly to prove how awesome Steve McQueen and Yul Brynner's characters are, though it's played with a bit more realism than many examples: the men thus disarmed are visibly injured and bleeding afterwards.
• The Man from Colorado: During the robbery at the mine office, one of the guards shoots Jericho's gun out his hand, although this seems to have been an accident (the guard had just been shot and jerked the trigger spasmodically. He certainly wasn't aiming). The dropped gun later becomes part of the evidence Owen uses to hang Jericho's brother Johnny.
• In The Man from Laramie, Will does this when Dave starts shooting at him while Will is trying to collect Miss Canady's cattle. Because he is a sociopath, Dave has his cowboys grab Will and hold him, and Dave then shoots Will right through the hand.
• Man of the House has a Texas Ranger guarding five or so cheerleaders who witnessed a murder. One cheerleader at one point asks "couldn't you just shoot the gun out of the bad guy's hand?" to which the man explains that it doesn't work. Near the end of the movie, it does. As he did not intend to do that, the Ranger was more impressed than anybody else who saw it.
• The Mask has a deliberate, Rule of Funny case: in the scene where the title character is dodging enemy fire, at a certain point he becomes a gunslinger, and loses his gun to an incoming bullet, right before his "dying at the enemy's arms" routine.
• Maverick. The title character does this to some of the robbers who were dressed as Indians.
• The Medallion: Done by Jackie Chan of all people. He is right next to the guy when he does it but the mooks hand is perfectly fine afterward.
• In The Mummy Rick shoots a sword out of Ardeth's hand; Ardeth isn't hurt and the sword seems to have not taken damage, since he shows up with the same sword later.
• My Darling Clementine: Tensions have been rising between Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday for a while, but when the Clantons frame Doc for the murder of Wyatt's brother, Doc skips town and Wyatt chases him down to challenge him to a duel. Wyatt wins, but he doesn't want to kill Doc, only arrest him, so he invokes this trope instead.
• No Name on the Bullet: When Sheriff Buck Hastings starts to draw on Gant as Gant is walking away from him, Gant spins round and shoots the gun out of his hand. Later, as Luke is bandaging Hastings' hand, Hastings confides to him that part of him is secretly glad, because even though this no means he has no hope of moving Gant on, the fact that is not dead means that he is not Gant's target.
• In The Outlaws IS Coming!, Annie Oakley does this multiple times as she secretly makes it look like Ken Cabot is an expert marksman.
• In Panic in the Streets, Warren saves Reed's life by shooting Blackie's gun out of his hand as Blackie is about to shoot Reed.
• Anti-Villain Duke does this when Boze grabs a gun in The Petrified Forest. Duke, who is a notorious gangster, insists it was an accident.
• In The Phantom, this is what the Phantom mostly uses his twin handguns for; he's the heroic gunslinger type.
• Non-weapon example: in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, Jack Sparrow makes Davy Jones drop a treasure chest by shooting it.
• Dolworth does it to J.W. Grant at the end of The Professionals.
• Purgatory: Wild Bill Hickock can do it while firing one handed.
• Subverted in The Quick and the Dead where it's done as a Kick the Dog instead of a non-lethal means of ending the duel. "Ace" Hanlon boasts that he can kill a man with either hand, and did so while killing the notorious Terrence Brothers. Unfortunately Herod, the man he's about to duel, was the one who actually killed them, so he shows his contempt by shooting Hanlon in his gun hand, then inviting him to draw with the other hand, which promptly gets a bullethole through it as well.
• Raiders of the Lost Ark:
  • The opening sequence does a variation: Indy whips the gun out of someone's hand when he tries to shoot him.
  • At the start of the Nepal gunfight, Indy shoots a machine gun out of the hands of a mook who was about to shoot him. While the mook doesn't actually drop his gun, it does cause the mook's shot to miss and buy Indy enough time to get to cover.
• In The Rawhide Terror, the Sheriff arrives in time to shoot Brent's gun out of his hand and prevent him from killing Tom.
• Two cops get their guns shot out of their hands by Chris Penn in the first Rush Hour movie. One of them loses a pinky.
• The little-known but absolutely brilliant parody Rustlers' Rhapsody hallmarks bi-directionally, as the only way the Hero knows how to shoot anyone is to shoot them in the hand. In fact, they take it so far as to show his daily shooting practice being at targets... that are drawings of a hand holding a gun. He is a Good Guy, after all. Then (since the lampshade is already in the room), the nemesis, an even BETTER Good Guy, and therefore a better shot and a snappier dresser, brings it back around to only shoot the guns FROM their hands. In the climactic gunfight, the two good guys shoot the guns out of each others' hands.
• Septiembre of The Sabata Trilogy can do this—by kicking bullets at people.
• A twist on this trope appears in the 1994 movie The Shadow. The hero and his nemesis simultaneously shoot at each other with antique pistols while the latter is making his escape, and we see the two bullets hit each other in mid-air and then fall to the ground harmlessly, causing both characters to pause momentarily in stunned disbelief.
• When Moriarty has a pistol pressed against Rebecca's head in Sherlock: Case of Evil, Holmes knocks it out of his hand with a throwing knife.
• Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows has an unusual lethal variant; When Watson is attacked by Moriarty's mooks, he shoots one of them in the arm, causing him to drop the grenade he'd just primed. The mook is unable to recover the grenade in time to throw it, and it blows up the train carriage they were standing in.
• Inspector Lestrade shots a gun out of Professor Moriarty's hand to save Sherlock Holmes in Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon.
  • Holmes reciprocates in Sherlock Holmes and the House of Fear, blasting a revolver out of a suspect's hand before it can be brought to bear on Lestrade.
• Used in Shooter when Mark Wahlberg makes a long-range sniper shot to blow in half the gun a thug is using to threaten his hostage. Then subverted seconds later when, while the thug expresses admiration at the first shot, Wahlberg's character fires again and blows off the thug's arm just below the elbow. This would probably be considered a case of Improbable Aiming Skills, since the first shot actually took off the gun's stock and most of the bad guy's hand, since he'd taped his hand to the gun to prevent this very trope. Granted, due to the good guy's Improbable Aiming Skills (he had shot another sniper through his scope immediately before) and the positions of the target and hostage relative to the shooter (such that it would have been unlikely that the hostage would have been hit by shrapnel), it would have been fairly justified if the movie had played the trope completely straight.
• In Silver Lode, Ballard shoots a gun out of Mitch Evans' hand, which puts a strain on their relationship as future brothers-in-law.
• John Harrison does this to Spock in Star Trek Into Darkness. Justified in that he's actually Khan Noonien Singh, so a stunt like that isn't too improbable.
• In Star Wars (all media) it's possible, thanks to the incredible mind powers of the Jedi, to disarm enemies in a variety of ways: destroying their weapons, pulling them out of their grasp, etc. Characters who aren't Force sensitive aren't so lucky, though.
• Subverted in Tall Tale. While fully capable, Pecos Bill shoots off the trigger fingers to subdue gunmen rather than the guns. Supposedly he only does on this Sunday, as he never kills people on Sunday.
• When Buck confronts Haines in the cabin at the end of The Terror of Tiny Town, he shoots Haines' gun out of his hand. This leads to a Let's Fight Like Gentlemen battle.
• In the climax of Part II of The Three Musketeers (1961), Athos shoots a sword Milady is holding out of her hand with a wheellock pistol as she attempts to kill an unconscious D'Artagnan.
• Today We Kill... Tomorrow We Die!: O'Bannion charges out of the trading post after the Comancheros only to find that Efago has arrived with the rest of his gang. O'Bannion starts to riase his gun only to have Elfago shoot it out of his hand. Later, Kiowa shoots the machete out of Elfago's hand as Elfago is about to kill O'Bannion.
• Total Recall (1990): As Lori is about to stab Melina to death, Quaid shoots the knife out of her hand.
• Truth or Dare (2012): When Paul attempts to call the police, Justin shoots the phone out of his hand. One of Paul's fingers is shot off in the process.
• Under Western Stars: We couldn't have Roy Rogers, the hero of a kid's cowboy movie actually kill a sheriff's deputy, after all. (The sheriff is working for the evil water company while Roy is leading the heroic cattle rancher resistance.)
• Whispering Smith: When the wounded Sinclair tries to shoot at the buckboard containing Marian and Bill, Smith steps out of hiding and shoots the rifle out of his hands,
• Wonder Woman (2017): During her confrontation with Ludendorff, Diana blasts his gun out of his hand with one of his own bullets deflected by her bracelet.
• In Yellow Hair and the Fortress of Gold, The Pecos Kid shoots the sacrificial dagger of the chief's hands as he is about to sacrifice Yellow Hair.

Literature

• Ben Snow: In "The Vanished Steamboat", Ben shoots the gun out of the hand of someone who draws on him. When is employer asks him why he did that, Ben explains that it wasn't intententional, but when you don't have time to aim you instinctively shoot at what your eyes are looking at, and his attention had been focused on the gun.
• Doctor Who Expanded universe: In the Eighth Doctor Adventures novel "Trading Futures", the Eighth Doctor demonstrates such uncanny aim that he manages to shoot bullets fired from a rifle out of thin air with only a standard handgun.
• "The Living Daylights" by Ian Fleming, a James Bond short story, averts the bit about not getting hurt severely. Bond estimates the woman he shot may be permanently crippled, and if she recovers physically, she's likely to be spooked for the rest of her life (hence the title). At that, the only reason he didn't kill her outright was that he thought she was cute. He also gets a ballocking from his superiors for putting an agent at risk (the woman he shot was a Soviet sniper about to kill the agent) as he delayed his shot to sight on her arm instead.
• Subverted in The Famous Five book Five have a Wonderful Time: a gun is whipped out of an enemy's hand, by fair-folk member Bufflo, who is particularly skilled with a whip. The narrative lampshades how dangerous this trick is, in that the gun might have gone off.
• In Harry Potter the Expelliarmus spell is designed solely for disarming an opponent of their wand without damaging it. If cast correctly, the disarmed wand will fly towards the disarmer so that it can be neatly plucked from out of the air. It has a somewhat unspecified effect though. The first time it's introduced, Snape blasts Lockhart across the Great Hall, the second time it knocks a diary out of Malfoy's hand. Though, most people are unable to fight from the floor. In a later book, this may be explained by the fact that skilled wizards can silently cast spells without having to say the incantation aloud. Snape may have been using one spell, while pretending to use another, just because he could.
  • It's possible the spell's power can be adjusted depending on whether the user merely wants to cause someone to drop their weapon or knock them backwards.
  • The spell also seems to disarm anything as a concept, instead of just removing held items. Harry manages to escape the grasp of a giant spider this way, using the spell to briefly force open the mandibles holding him.
• Jack Ryan:
  • In Rainbow Six, a sniper puts a rifle round into the SMG a terrorist is holding, almost breaking the SMG in half. However, the incident massively subverts the spirit of the trope as the only reason the sniper shot the SMG out of the way is so that his fellow sniper had a clear shot to the terrorist's liver. When you're a terrorist who has earlier in the chapter murdered a little girl in a wheelchair on live TV, sometimes even elite counter-terrorist agents just want you to die slowly and painfully. Their superior officers call them on the carpet for their unprofessional behavior, but they get off with only a warning.
  • Earlier in the novel, it's explicitly stated why they shouldn't do this: They always assume the bad guy has a backup weapon, and that backup is often a hand grenade. Hence the policy of shooting enemies in the head.
  • Subverted in The Cardinal of the Kremlin when the head of the HRT unit used to rescue a scientist kidnapped by the KGB uses his MP5 to shred the bad guy's gun arm. A few sentences later, there's an internal dialogue about how he would chew out anyone on his team who did that, themselves.
  • Commented upon in Patriot Games when the main character is asked something to the effect of "why not shoot the gun out of his hands?" during the trial after he foiled the assassination of Prince Charles and Princess Diana. Ryan points out that you have to be a really good shot to even try such a feat, and the lawyer had just claimed that he'd just tried and failed to kill another man (whom Ryan had deliberately given an incapacitating but not immediately lethal wound) from three feet, which would suggest that Ryan was a bad shot, and the lawyer can't have it both ways.
• The Dark Tower:
  • Played straight during Roland's brief sojourn: it is mentioned that shooting a gun out of a bad guy's hand is a regular move for Roland, but extremely difficult for normal people.
  • Further played straight in The Drawing of the Three when Roland shoots a gangster's gun and the magazine in the gun ignites and explodes.
  • He also manages to shoot the blade of a knife a random thug is holding.
  • Stephen does this to Roland in Wizard and Glass. The gun in question is ruined by the shot.
• Subversion: Kino's Journey features the main character attempting to blast a shotgun out of another fighter's hands. She aims, however, to blow most of the digits on his left hand off, and the man's cybernetic hand is Immune to Bullets.
• One of the Monk novels involves Disher shooting a gun out of a man's hand. The man does get injured, but it's not very serious; and Disher wasn't actually aiming for his hand, anyway.
• In The Cobra Trilogy, the Cobras can aim the lasers built into their smallest fingers with enough accuracy to do this. They are Super Soldiers with built-in combat computers.
• Also by Zahn... well, Zahn and Stackpole collaborating, in the novella Side Trip, apparently Thrawn disguised as a bounty hunter can do this.
• Scarecrow: Shane Schofield pulls this against the Big Bad (a civilian). This was almost certainly accidental, because he followed up with an attempted headshot.
• In Bat Durston, Space Marshal, the title hero is a campy space cowboy who carries a six-shot blaster. In the final showdown, he shoots the guns out of the outlaws' hands.
• In Robert A. Heinlein's Time Enough for Love, during "The Tale of the Adopted Daughter," Lazarus Long relates an encounter between himself, his wife Dora, and a trio of would-be pioneer bandits. Dora, sensing an impending confrontation, excuses herself to the kitchen where she draws her weapon and aims it at the chief villain. The instant he draws on Lazarus, she shoots his gun out of his hand, clearing the way for Lazarus and a guard dog to eliminate the other two hostiles. Lazarus then compliments her on making the absolutely correct split-second decision.
• The Alloy of Law contains multiple instances of the main character doing this to a specific villain, who gets fed up with it in a hurry. The villain has an absolutely terrifying Healing Factor (he can easily survive being blown up point-blank by dynamite) so when his hand gets blown apart it mostly just pisses him off. The second time, he loses an incredibly expensive gun: "Dammit! Do you know how much those things are worth?" More concerned about the gun than the hand that just got shot. A bit later, after the third or fourth time he gets a gun shot out of his hand: "Stop doing that! You bast--"
• In the Bob Lee Swagger novel I, Sniper, Swagger gets into a standoff with the Big Bad and does this. The narration draws attention to the fact that the Big Bad's hand ends up practically ruined, bleeding profusely from shrapnel damage, and that it isn't like cowboy movies at all.
• Not often used in the works of J.T. Edson, but Waco does it in "Jase Holmes's Killer" in Sagebrush Sleuth. He does it with the collusion of the man he was drawing against, in order to prove that the man was not really a fast gun.
• The Worst Shots in the West has the main characters, Tim and Tom, do this several times... by accident.
• This even happens in The Lord of the Rings, and surprisingly often:
  • The Nazgul at the Ford of Bruinen... do something... to break Frodo's sword and force him to drop it.
  • One of the Riders of Rohan shoots Grishnakh in the sword-hand, making him drop his sword. The shot is noted as being particularly lucky.
  • Gandalf also... does something... to make Denethor's sword fly out of his hand Expelliarmus-style when he is about to attack Beregond.
• Older Than Print: The Heimskringla includes the story of the battle of Svolder in the year 1000, in which the bowman Einar Thambarskelfir single-handedly held back the forces trying to take the king's ship... until someone managed to hit his bow with an arrow and split it in half.
  "What is that," cried King Olaf, "that broke with such a noise?"
  "Norway, king, from your hands," cried Einar.
• In "Target: Domino Lady" in Domino Lady: Sex as a Weapon, the Domino Lady uses her .22 automatic to shot a gun out of Miles Prince's hand in order to save Inspector Michael McCarty.
• In the Nero Wolfe novel The Golden Spiders, Archie Goodwin at one point shoots the gun out of the hand of a hoodlum who is holding one of Wolfe's other investigators hostage.
• Happens during the arrest of the villain in Mystery in the Channel by Freeman Wills Crofts. Definitely not painless, though — the man loses his thumb.
• Joe Pickett: In Free Fire, Nate shoots a rifle out of the hands of a crazed survivalist. The survivalist loses several fingers in the process.
• A Clash of Kings. Theon Greyjoy sees some of his reavers scuffling over some plunder, one of whom, Todric, is drunk. In an attempt to impress his men with his prowess and "leadership", he decides he'll shoot the horn of ale out of the drunk man's hand. Unfortunately for both of them, the man moved as Theon loosed the arrow and Todric got shot in the belly instead. To save face, he tells the rest of his men that he does not tolerate drunkards or fighting over plunder.
• In Forced Perspectives by Tim Powers, the hero shoots a gun out of the hand of the bad guy who's shooting at him, because the rest of the gunman is behind cover and in any case he'd rather not kill anybody. The gunman's hand is seriously injured by having the gun blasted out of it, and remains a handicap to him for the rest of the book.
• Standard practice for the butei in Aria the Scarlet Ammo, seeing as they can't shoot to kill. In the spinoff "Hidan no aria AA", it even shows the school using silhouette targets with the circles around a handgun.

Live-Action TV

• In the fifth season of 24, Jack Bauer performs this on a terrorist who is holding a gun to his own head, ready to kill himself rather than be captured. Seconds later, the terrorist finds an alternate way to kill himself via exploding vest.
• In The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., Brisco not only wins a heavily built-up fight against the supposedly invincible gunslinger Utah Johnny Montana, he does it by shooting a bullet down the barrel of his gun. They have some fun Playing with a Trope, as Brisco is puzzled about how he pulled off such a feat. The explanation is that Montana just wasn't very good.
  • This shot was tried on MythBusters (see below), and was found to be "plausible, but literally a one-in-a-million shot" — the team was able to replicate this, using a automatic and a revolver.
  • This was a replication of something that happened in a real gunfight, but it wasn't down the barrel. The bullet from the automatic hit one of the revolver's chambers, jamming it.
• In Alphas, as of Season 2, this is among the Improbable Aiming Skills Hicks can accomplish with his power. In "The Quick and the Dead," he shoots a tiny box knife out of the hand of an Alpha with Super-Speed. "Alphaville" has the more conventional example of a pistol being shot out of someone's hand — except he does it while jumping down from a higher floor with no time to aim.
• Blake's 7
  • Space Commander Travis has a laser weapon built into his artificial hand. The hand is destroyed on two separate occasions. When Paul Darrow (Avon) does this, the "Good shot!"/"Not really I was aiming for his head" line is used (originally to be cut, but left in as Paul Darrow is a Western fan).
  • In "Headhunter", a Killer Robot does this by remotely accessing and overloading the circuits on their handguns.
• Discussed in Blue Bloods after Jamie kills a man for the first time. A reporter at a press briefing asks Frank why Jamie shot to kill instead of trying to shoot the gun out of the man's hand. Frank just sort of gives him an exasperated look before explaining that Jamie followed department policy, which is to shoot until the threat is neutralized. Then, when the reporter keeps trying to press the issue, Frank shuts him up for good:
  Frank: There's a man in front of you waving a gun in your direction. You have a second to react. What do you do?
  Reporter: Well, first I'd-
  Frank: [interrupts] Too late. You're dead.
• Booth does it to Broadsky on Bones during their Sniper Duel. He breaks Broadsky’s right hand in the process and later Hodgins realizes that and tells Booth. Booth ignores his training and goes low, realizing Broadsky can only shoot by resting the gun on his broken hand, and is able to disarm and capture him.
• Burn Notice:
  • Michael Westen shoots a knife out of Larry's hand in "Enemies Closer". Although, given the way he was bleeding, he may have been shot in the hand. Michael's timing gives the moment a bit of irony:
    Larry: Your trigger finger has rusted o— *BANG*
  • Exception to the painless part. Fiona uses a sniper rifle to shoot a gun out of the Big Bad of the week's hand. He's seen wincing in pain with his hand dripping blood. In the same episode, she also blasts a Molotov Cocktail out of a drug dealer's hand. After he had already lit it.
• Subverted in Castle: "Hell of a shot, Castle." "I was aiming for his head." Which is even funnier when you realize that this is a direct Shout-Out to another show Fillion worked on.
  • The ending of the episode "Once Upon a Time in the West": Castle and the murderer face each other. They both go for their guns. Beckett walks in the room and shoots the murderer's gun out of his hand.
• The same thing happened on an episode of CSI; the bullet jammed the gun of a suspect by sheer chance. This was lucky as they need to prove the suspect was facing the officer and pointing the gun at him when the shot was fired.
• In Deadliest Warrior, Jesse James shoots a gun out of Al Capone's hand (even though he could have just shot Capone dead easily). But no, because of this action of showing off, Jesse wasted his last bullet in his guns and gets beaten half to death by Capone before Frank James saves the day.
• Doctor Who:
  • Doc Holliday does this to Seth Harper in "The Gunfighters". Also Wyatt Earp making his Big Entrance. He shoots the gun out of Steven's hand after hearing him mock-boast of being the Fastest Gun in the West, just to demonstrate that showing off like that can get you killed in Tombstone.
  • Happens to medieval warlord Irongron three times in "The Time Warrior". Once by Linx with his hand laser, once by the Doctor shooting the control box out of his hands with a crossbow, and most impressively, Hal shooting an axe out of Irongron's hand with a bow.
  • In "Dimensions in Time" — the Doctor Who/EastEnders charity special for Children In Need — Mike Yates shoots the Rani's gun out of her hands when he arrives to save the Doctor.
  • The Doctor himself makes use of this trope every now and again, but with his sonic screwdriver instead of specifically a gun, which ends up making a bit more sense; as opposed to aiming at the improbably exact spot of a physical object, he's tuning into a specific frequency in the immediate environment, which would overall be more effective. You could conceivably blast all of their guns out of all of their hands in one fell swoop, which is what he in fact does in "Cold Blood" against the Silurians, and later in "Let's Kill Hitler", effortlessly swiping River's knife out of her hand.
  • "Nikola Tesla's Night of Terror": During the climax, the Skithra Queen uses her tail-weapon to blast Thomas Edison's gun out of his hand when he attempts to shoot her.
• Due South
  • Ben shoots a gun out of an dog catcher's hand in the episode "The Wild Bunch".
  • In the episode "Chinatown", Fraser is impressed when Vecchio disarms a crook just in the nick of time using this method. Vecchio then admits that he was aiming for the guy's chest.
• Father Brown: In "The Daughter of Autolycus", Flambeau's daughter shoots the pistol out of the hand of one of her kidnappers during her escape. When Flambeau expresses incredulity at this, she admits that she had actually been aiming for his head and failed to account for the recoil.
• Firefly:
  • In "Safe", Zoe blasts a revolver out of a man's hands at a good hundred yards, with a shotgun, from the hip.
  • Mal tops this in Serenity (2005) by Quick Drawing, and shooting The Operative's gun out of his hands from the hip. He Quick Drew on someone already with a gun out, and managed to hipshot their gun away before they could fire. And he did this against a Super-Soldier.
• Frontier Circus: Ben does this in "The Good Fight", disarming the villainous foreman leading a lynch mob by shooting him in the gun hand.
• Done twice by Guerrero in the Season 2 premiere of Human Target. Looks pretty painful both times.
• Hunter (1984). In "Fagin 1986" the title character shoots an underage crook and is asked by a reporter why he didn't do this — Hunter ridicules the idea, yet "High Noon in L.A." has Hunter challenged to a duel and using this trope to win without killing his opponent.
• In the Jonathan Creek episode "The Three Gamblers", a non-gun example of this occurs; Jonathan uses a card trick he's been learning to throw a playing card with such force that it forces a criminal to drop a gun when the criminal was threatening Jonathan's investigative partner Maddie (although Jonathan admits that he was actually "aiming for his balls".
• Legends of Tomorrow: In the Western-themed episode "The Magnificent Eight", this happens twice. First, Snart shoots Jeb Stillwater's gun out of his hands from a second-storey window using a rifle. Later, Jax does the same to one of Stillwater's gang members at a slightly shorter range from horseback using a pistol.
• Another classic example: The Lone Ranger used this frequently, at least in his radio and TV incarnations. According to The Other Wiki, this was part of The Lone Ranger Creed. Namely that the Lone Ranger was never allowed to shoot to kill, instead he was to always attempt to disarm the opponent as painlessly as he could.
• Lost: Not a weapon, but Danny blasts a walkie-talkie out of Kate's hand in "Not in Portland". The Others are the anti-stormtroopers.
• M*A*S*H: There's a comedic variant when Major Burns wants a small ceremonial cannon fired and the gunner warns him that with the angle, Radar is in the line of fire. Burns refuses to listen and orders the firing and Radar's bugle is knocked out of his hands with the cannonball. Radar is naturally furious at being almost hit himself. The private who fired the shot is naturally apologetic.
• Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers: Kimberly shoots the Snizard's arrow in half with one of her own arrows to stop him from nailing the other Rangers. She then defeats his squad of Putties, cuts her friends loose, blasts his tonsil snakes, and then kills him.
• Done again on MythBusters in Episode 135: "Unarmed and Unharmed" where the more traditional method of shooting the body of the weapon is explored. The myth is partially busted in that their tests showed that in the "draw", and "hostage" positions, the gun could be shot out of the dummy's hands but not in the "shootout" position (as the gun was built to take force in exactly that direction). Furthermore, in the "draw" and "shootout" positions, the dummy holding the gun and the two bystanders dummies behind him were sprayed with shrapnel that knocked holes in the plywood, and even the "hostage" position showed a lot of shrapnel that (through luck more than anything) did not hit the dummies. When tests were performed involving a gun with handles at the wrong angles and with the trigger remotely fired, Adam held onto the gun in all three cases and Jamie dropped it in two (again, "draw" and "hostage"), showing that the disarming might not be consistent either.
• One Life to Live. Angry at the formerly milquetoast man she's hired to pose as her husband, mob chief Alex Hesser picks up the phone to call the cops on him. He proves he's taken her lessons to heart when he draws a gun and shoots the phone out of her hand.
• Poirot: Gustav does it to the police lieutenant just before plummeting to his death in "The Labours of Hercules".
• Lampshaded in Psych when a machete-wielding man drops his weapon and shouts "In the hand?" in disbelief after being shot.
• Unlike the films it was based on, RoboCop: The Series sees Murphy use his gun to take out weapons (or drop things on the shooters) instead off actually shooting the criminals themselves.
• In the Red Dwarf episode "Gunmen of the Apocalypse", this is taken one step further: The Cat shoots two incoming bullets while they're in mid flight, although the crew are in a computer simulation at the time. (Aside: it turns out that bullets are an absolute nightmare to film, requiring a great many takes to get them to fall from just outside camera and stay in the field of view.)
• The Rifleman: Lucas McCain frequently performs this trick when he doesn't want to kill the person or even persons he is facing off against. Typically it is a fast hip shot with his lever action rifle blasting a pistol out of a persons hand leaving them clutching a seemingly unwounded hand in pain.
• Taken to ridiculous extremes in the new series of Robin Hood: Robin has repeatedly fired arrows at people and knocked swords out of their hands. In one instance, it's a pair of shears and they promptly go flying many feet up into the air, whereupon Robin hits them again, spectacularly splitting them in two. (In Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Robin simply puts an arrow through Will Scarlett's hand to disarm him.)
• Used in practically every episode of Sledge Hammer! by police and criminals alike. In fact, the only time Sledge actually shoots a person is unintentionally when he fires at the target on his closet door when there is, unbeknownst to him, a would-be assassin hiding inside.
• Star Trek: The Next Generation: In "A Fistful of Datas", Worf does this in a holodeck program that's basically a Cliché Storm of The Wild West.
• Star Trek: Voyager:
  • In "Relativity", when Seven of Nine is chasing a saboteur who teleports by activating his tricorder, she manages a shot that flips it out of his hand and away, forcing him to run instead of teleport.
  • The Hirogen do this several times in "The Killing Game", as they're under orders from their Alpha not to permanently injure the Voyager crew.
• Subverted nicely in Third Watch; Sully shoots a bomb's remote detonator clear out of a perp's hand with his six-shooter. Upon being complimented, his partner even saying "I'm serious, man, that was the best shot I've ever seen," Sully admits he was aiming for the perp's head, and missed.
• Exception: In The Twilight Zone episode "Mr. Denton on Doomsday", Denton and his opponent both shoot the guns out of each other's hands at the climax — and both suffer such injury to their hands that they can never fire a gun again. It is also shown that both gunslingers seemed to have made that shot because they both drank the myseterious Doctor Fate's special aiming tonic, which Dr. Fate says would give someone perfect aim for ten seconds. It is implied Doctor Fate set this up so both shooters would injure themselves so they could walk away.
• In a White Collar episode, Peter shoots a talkie-walkie from a bank robber's hand so he can't warn off his accomplices. Neal calls him "Butch Cassidy" afterward.
• Happens to Hogan in the first episode of Wild Boys, although it seems likely that this was an accident: the trooper was firing at Hogan and happened to hit Hogan's gun. The injury to Hogan's hand allows the troopers to identify him later.
• The short-lived series Wild Side had a variant where one of the heroes deliberately shoots out the cylinder (the rotating section that contains a revolver's bullets) of an opponent's guns.
• Happens in the Young Blades episodes "The Exile" and "Secrets of the Father", with no resultant injuries either time.

Myths & Religion

• Classical Mythology: The Greek hero Philoctetes shot four arrows at Paris: the first missed, the third hit his eye and the fourth his heel, but the second got his bow hand, disarming Paris of the weapon he had just used to kill Achilles.

Tabletop Games

• Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition: One of the maneuvers from the Battle Master subclass, Disarming Strike, allows this to occur with any ranged weapon, be it with a bow, a sling, a thrown spear, or a gun.
• Psionics: The Next Stage in Human Evolution:
  • The Trick Shot and Bull’s Eye techniques allow you to do this with firearms and thrown weapons, respectively.
  • The TK Disarm talent allows you to grab weapons from your enemy's hands with telekinesis.
• Shadowrun: One of the explicitly specified uses of the Called Shot rule is to shoot an object out of someone's hands. Due to the -4 dice pool penalty for trying it, it takes an incredibly skilled expert to even have a hope of succeeding.
• The New World of Darkness games somewhat avert this trope in that while it's possible to attempt this trope, as in Shadowrun it involves a hefty penalty. Also, the attack is explicitly against the opponent's hand rather than the weapon itself. A successful hit deals damage to the person just like a normal attack, plus any additional effects (such as disarming the target, damaging the target's weapon, and maiming the target's hand) that the Storyteller thinks appropriate.
• The "Singing Cowboys" Deadworld of All Flesh Must Be Eaten has this as effectively the only attack anyone can perform - singing cowboys cannot kill, unless the opponent tried to kill them first (then it's self-defense) or is not truly alive (such as zombies); it's worth noting that both of the exceptions are also the only ways singing cowboys can be killed. A running gag in the section is that all bullets hit people "right in the gun".
• Hero System: If your character knows a ranged martial art, the Ranged Disarm maneuver is this trope. While it takes a certain amount of skill (targeting a hand-held weapon is the same to-hit penalty as targeting a hand), it does no damage to the person holding the targeted weapon.
• The Pyramid Magazine article More Modern Magic: Arcane Armament, about magic weapons for d20 Modern, included the Lone Revolver, a legendary item which allowed the wielder to attempt a ranged disarm at no penalty. (It could also only shoot to wound, never reducing the target to -5 hp. Except for werewolves, because regardless of the bullets fired, it counts as silver damage.)

Theme Parks

• On Men in Black: Alien Attack at Universal Studios Florida, there's a few secret targets in the ride that require guests to shoot at the guns certain aliens are holding, rather than the aliens themselves.

Video Games

• In 7.62 High Calibre, you can aim at specific body parts when using the aiming or scope firing stance. Aiming at arms tends to cause little injury (especially if your target is wearing some of the better body armor), but carries a chance of making the target drop their weapon. The heavier the weapon, the more likely the target is to drop it. However, they will try to recover their weapon, or switch to a different one (usually grenades). If they're under suppressive fire, they'll run away, and find someone else's weapon to use, meaning that you still need to put them down eventually.
• In Arcanum: Of Steamworks & Magick Obscura, scoring a Critical Hit on an opponent has a chance of making them drop their weapon with or without damaging it. Magick users can also learn the Disarm spell, which has a similar effect.
• Beneath a Steel Sky: When Reich attempts to apprehend Robert, LINC vaporizes the weapon that was drawn with a precise shot. However, this is followed up by a second lethal shot.
• A rare action in Call of Duty 2 is when you or your AI teammates accidentally shoot the primary weapon of an enemy soldier off of them. When this happens, they'll immediately pull out their sidearms and continue firing back.
• In Cortex Command, weapons held by troops physically exist and can be hit. Heavily armoured units wielding mininuke launchers are not so scary when disarmed with a lucky or exceptionally precise shot. Same holds true for drones - their mounted machine guns can be destroyed without expending rounds to dig through the drone's several layers of plating. Additionally, strong impacts might knock a weapon away from someone's grip, even if it's a suicidal enemy flying head-first into their ranks on a jetpack. In a setting where everyone is equipped with one, and flying doesn't stop anyone from holding a huge riot shield. Additionally, thrown explosives can be shot out of the would-be grenadier's hands resulting in a shower of gore or scrap.
• In Cosmic Break, some weapons are built INTO the arm. Solution? Letting you blast your opponent's entire arm off. But, in some cases, the opponent is a "human" character, which will end up in this trope being played straight.
• In all three Wild West stages of the NES game Day Dreamin' Davey, you'll face off with gun-slinging bandits at the end of each stage, where Davey has to blast the guns off of their hands before they shoot at you. The higher the Wild West stage number is, the more bandits' guns you'll shoot out of their hands at the end.
• The psychopath boss Seymour in Dead Rising 2 will shoot your gun out of your hand as soon as you equip it.
• In Destiny 2, the exotic weapon quest for the Last Word, a cowboy-styled Hand Cannon intended to be fired from the hip, requires you to take part in multiple duels with increasing numbers of enemies, where you are required to shoot their guns out of their hands as they draw. You miss the gun? You die, and have to restart the duel section.
• Deus Ex:
  • You can shoot the arms of people to make them drop their weapon. They bleed, but unless you tranq'd them in the same shot, they generally don't pass out — they just start running.
  • Lampshaded in the Human Revolution tie-in comic, where a police captain chastises Adam for deliberately wounding an armed suspect rather than just killing him.
• The Disarm Shout in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Zun Haal Viik, will send any equipped weapon flying. Rarely useful for the player (disarmed opponents won't yield, and few enemies have weapons good enough for disarming them to be a better strategy than attacking them, although it can be handy for melee fighters to get close to an archer), but very annoying when used on you to send your painstakingly hand-crafted Infinity -1 Sword soaring off to the Divines know where.
• In Fable II, the 4 star "Dextrous Styles" ability is to target specific parts of an enemy. Aside from the usual Decapitations and the like, you can disarm enemies this way.
• Throughout the Fallout series, crippling body parts also cripples offensive and defensive power. If you cripple a character's legs, movement is wasteful; if you shoot their eyes or head, accuracy drops; if you shoot an arm, they can't easily use a two-handed weapon (or, rather, a weapon that requires two-handed animation sprites) and that usually leaves less effective knives or hand-to-hand. A good strategy to combat with super mutants, who usually use lethal two-handed weapons, is to open full-burst while on their flank, or to target an arm specifically.
  • In Fallout 3 and New Vegas, reliance on a more real-time VATS system and the ability to inflict weapon damage makes this both easier and harder at the same time (especially since you take almost no damage while in VATS in 3). Enemies have the same responses in the earlier games when faced with wounded limbs (or weapons they couldn't use). Breaking a weapon creates a chance of invoking the trope, as does crippling the arm holding it. You can also shoot an enemy's explosives (in hand or in flight) for an assisted suicide bombing. In practice, shooting the weapons themselves is often functionally worthless, as weapons are extremely hard-to-hit targets compared to body parts, the disarmed person will continue trying to kill you with their bare hands (when most of the point of this trope is to disarm people non-lethally), and you render a potentially useful or at least valuable weapon worthless. That said, for a player that has sufficiently leveled up their gun skills, it becomes a viable tactic when playing Fallout 3 with Broken Steel installed. The tougher Super Mutant Overlords added in the DLC often wield Tri-Beam Laser Rifles, which deal a lot of damage to begin with and on top of that, Overlords get a significant damage boost when using them. As such, it's a good idea to get it out of their hands, otherwise they can take you down with a few well-aimed shots. What's more, Tri-Beam Laser Rifles sell for a good amount even when damaged and aren't nearly as useful to the player (since it's only a super-powerful Armor-Piercing Attack when used against the player), so it's not much of a loss to damage them.
    • This tactic is advised in the New Vegas DLC Dead Money, at least with one type of enemy. The Ghost Seekers often carry an improvised explosive called a gas bomb, a fire extinguisher with a sensor. Seeing that you need to blast off limbs to make sure the Ghost People die, you can/have to blow up the bomb to kill them quickly.
• Surprisingly, this also shows up in Grand Theft Auto IV, but it's difficult to pull off since a pistol is such a small target.
• Gun lets you do this, but with auto-targeting it's a little difficult. It seems to occur somewhat randomly during Bullet Time, though.
• When players of JFK: Reloaded go out-and-out psycho with a sniper rifle, it is possible to shoot pistols out of the hands of all the cops who are obligingly standing around facing at right angles to your window, provided you're a quick enough shot. Due to their motions, it is also possible to remove the hands as well as the guns in them.
• This is the most reliable way to get enemies to surrender in Judge Dredd: Dredd vs. Death. It's actually very useful for gameplay, since you need to make arrests to boost your law meter and score.
• In The Last Bounty Hunter, doing this is the only way to take any of the four outlaws alive, for which you get more points. For extra Improbable Aiming Skills, capturing the Cactus Kid requires you to do this during a Quick Draw.
• The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel IV has Ash and Musse pulling off this trope against Lechter and Claire respectively with Ash extending his weapon to disarm Lechter's knife and Musse shooting Claire's gun when they were trying to kill themselves.
• In the ninja chapter of Live A Live, Ryoma blasts Ode Iou's gun out of his hands with a well-aimed shot.
• This happens a lot in Lost Planet cutscenes.
• Mass Effect:
  • A hostage scene in Mass Effect 2 can be resolved this way as a paragon option.
  • A better example would be shooting the sword out of a Phantom's grasp in Mass Effect 3. Useful, because it disables the phantom's One-Hit Kill melee attack, but much harder in multiplayer, where there's no access to Bullet Time abilities like Adrenaline Rush.
• In MechWarrior 4, the Battlemaster 'Mech has a huge weapon (appropriately called the "BFG" in the MechLab; it's nearly as large as a 20-ton BattleMech) held by its right hand instead of the usual method of having a gun instead of hands, or the gun mounted adjacent to the hands. The BFG is the first thing shot off when you're piloting this 'Mech.
• This can be done in the Metal Gear games from Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty onwards. Once you blast a gun from an enemy's hands, he'll draw his sidearm, although you'll notice that his hand is shaking and he's bleeding.
• Happens in the Monkey Island series, albeit twice: once in The Curse of Monkey Island, when LeChuck raises his sword to kill Guybrush and Guybrush's future-wife Elaine shoots the sword off of LeChuck's hand and knocks it onto the mast of the Death Starfish; and once in Tales of Monkey Island, when she, as his demon bride, does the same to her undead husband (Guybrush) by raising her Cutlass of Kaflu to kill him, but this time Winslow is the shooter in knocking the Cutlass onto the rail of LeChuck's ship.
• Perfect Dark:
  • This Nintendo 64 game allows you to shoot guns out of people's hands. You or the guard (if he hadn't surrendered or pulled a backup gun) could grab it and use it again. (Amusingly, guards only went for their own gun even if there were several more just like it lying around.) Remember that it uses the same engine as GoldenEye, where peoples' guns are part of their hitbox. Except for the mines. Explodarity ensues.
  • The game also has a Disarm option where you can punch an enemy, causing them to drop their weapon. (Obviously this works better if you can sneak up on them instead of approaching from the front where you'll get shot.) The dreaded N-bomb can also cause you to become disoriented and drop your gun; if you recover it after the effect wears off, for some reason it has more ammo than when you dropped it.
• If you're not interested in killing people, this is always an option in Red Dead Redemption. You actually get extra Fame for disarming instead of killing opponents in duels. There is also a side mission that requires you to do this in a duel. In free roam, however, shooting the gun itself works without further injury (to the point where the enemy might immediately grab their lost weapon and resume firing). In the final duel between Jack Marston and Edgar Ross, however, you are not allowed to do this. If you don't kill your opponent, you'll be gunned down where you stand.
• Red Orchestra: This happens, although the player's avatar drops the weapon out of injury rather then the gun being shot away. Strangely enough, the player also drops any ammo for the gun he was using.
• In Red Steel, the player can perform this after receiving Ninja training. Enemies will grab up their guns after a few seconds, but while they're disarmed, they can be made to surrender permanently. This is advantageous.
• Resident Evil
  • Happens in Resident Evil 2 when Annette Birkin shoots Ada's gun out of her hand, starting the cutscene.
  • In Resident Evil 4, Ada shoots Krauser's knife out of his hand in order to stop him from killing Leon.
  • Chris Redfield does this at least twice, to Wesker's Samurai Edge in Resident Evil 5 and to Carla Radames's viral dart gun in Resident Evil 6. Notably, he averts the "harmless disarm" apsect: there's a nasty spray of blood from Wesker's hand, though he heals instantly, and Carla visibly shakes her hand in pain.
  • Resident Evil Village: Ethan can disarm Moroaicǎ by shooting their weapons out of their hands.
• Inverted in SiN (1998), it is possible for enemies to shoot your gun out of the player's hands (but apparently not vice-versa), which only has the effect of forcibly switching you to another weapon; you can switch right back. Also a subversion in that it does as much damage to the player as it would hitting them anywhere else.
• Slaps and Beans allows you to draw guns during Quick Time Events, where if done right will have you beating enemies to the draw and blasting their revolves as soon as they're drawn. For bonus hilarity, every now and then mooks will lose their belts too, leaving to some Comedic Underwear Exposure.
• The Soldier of Fortune games allow you to do this, as well as shooting off hats and sunglasses even; you can also disarm them of their grenades by hitting the grenade on their chest with a single bullet. A fully disarmed foe will either cower or run away.
• In Time Crisis 3, Alicia blasts a gun out of Giorgio Zott's hands during a standoff between Zott, Alan, and Wesley as he is about to execute Daniel, Alicia's brother. If you're playing on the Rescue Mission mode which has Alicia as the main character, you actually have to shoot the gun out of Zott's hand.
• This can be done in TimeShift, and is much easier if you use Slow Time or Stop Time to do it; however, enemies are smart enough to immediately run over to and pick up any nearby weapons lying on the ground.
• The Virtua Cop series offers bonus points for a "Justice Shot" if the player performs this trope on an enemy.
• XCOM: Enemy Unknown: The "Disabling Shot" ability that Snipers can pick at Lieutenant level emulates this. It has a 10% aim penalty and deals very little damage, but puts the target's weaponry out of commission, forcing them to reload to use it again. Also, for obvious reasons, if the target was on Overwatch, it can't take a reaction shot.^note The Sectopod's Macross Missile Massacre is unaffected, and it doesn't need to reload to use its cannon, but Cannon Fire, its main attack, remains disabled for one turn.

Visual Novels

• Gillian Seed in Snatcher does this to the surfer Ivan when he tries to shoot him. The "harmless disarm" part is averted as Ivan spends the rest of the scene clutching his hand in pain and begs Gillian to call an ambulance for him.

Webcomics

• The Adventures of Dr. McNinja parodies this when Dr. McNinja throws a shuriken which bounces between the hands of several people he's interrogating, assuming they would have pulled guns on him by then. They haven't, and he ends up apologizing profusely when he only succeeds in injuring their hands.
• In the Quest Den adventure The Book of Worms, Dr Mary Slate gets possessed and pulls a gun on Beth and the gang. Jeff neutralizes her with a well-placed shot:
  Something flys past your vision and the Glock explodes into a cloud of plastic and steel splinters.
• Dead Winter: Black Monday Blues makes an exception to his usual policy.
• Grrl Power has Peggy, a Badass Normal and Friendly Sniper in a team of formidable superheroes, who's entirely useful as a member of the team. When ordered to avoid fatalities, she's likely to pull stunts like shooting a sword out of a combatant's hands at sniping ranges.
• Subverted in The Jaded; one of Doc Ice's mutilated hands is caused by a gun being shot out of it.
• A Miracle of Science:
  • In a flashback to Ben's mad scientist days, a shot from the police blows up the BFG he's holding, but other than a few minor cuts and slightly singed clothes, he's unharmed.
  • Ben's pretty unlucky with this trope. To be fair, neither gun is that small a target.
• Schlock Mercenary:
  • Used, then subverted by Haban. When trying to kidnap someone, the A.I. in Haban's head first disables everyone's weapons. Typical use, but then subverted when it's discovered how the weapons were disabled...
    Kevin: The A.I. was subtle, using the absolute minimum force necessary to disarm us. All the safety switches have been fused in the "safe" position.
    Tagon: Kevin, philosophically speaking, there is no "safe" position for a firearm. When you pull the trigger, it is supposed to fire, period. The guns I issue my troops don't have namby-pamby safety switches.
    Kevin: Oh. Well, they do now.
    Tagon: That's not subtle. That's showing off.
  • In another case, the guns are shot out of hands; this works because the weapon is light caliber, the people in question have futuristic body armor that covers the hands, and in this case, the shot is aimed at the hand, not the gun, causing them to lose their grip.
• In Skin Horse, Nick, now able to remotely command his re-armed V-22 Osprey, blasts an Anasigma agent's gun with a gatling gun burst.
• In When She Was Bad, Sean disarms a cop this way when breaking Jasper out of prison.
• In The Wolf at Weston Court, Nova Petrov shoots a knife out of a Dwarf bandit's hand.

Western Animation

• Avatar: The Last Airbender: "Return to Omashu": When Mai draws her sai to finish off Katara, Sokka knocks it out of her hand with his boomerang.
• Batman: The Brave and the Bold: Jonah Hex and Cinnamon do this to the Royal Flash Gang in The Teaser to "The Siege of Starro, Part 1!".
• Beware the Batman: In "Alone", Commissioner Gordon shoots a knife out of Anarky's hand as he is about to stab Harvey Dent.
• Codename: Kids Next Door: Exaggerated in "Operation: V.I.R.U.S." Numbuh One is confronted by Cree Lincoln and pulls out a handgun, which she shots out of his hand with her Arm Blaster. Then he pulls out seven other guns from various spots on his body which she blasts out one by one. Thus Nigel is left with only... a comb, which Cree also shoots from his hand.
• Code Lyoko: "False Start": Jim Morales is running out of energy, raising his nail gun against Kankrelats when one of their lasers shoots it out of his hand. His hand is intact and the gun is a few inches away.
• DC Animated Universe:
  • Supergirl uses her heat vision to blast a gun out of Luthor's hand in Superman: The Animated Series. In this case his hand ends up in bandages.
  • In one episode of Batman: The Animated Series, the thrown batarang is clearly shown lodged in the mook's hand. This is a sequence Homageing Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, which has that happen regularly.
  • In some episodes, Batman throws a batarang accurately enough to lodge the tip in an opponent's gun barrel. At least once ("I Am The Night"), the mook fired the gun and got his hand injured by the resulting backfire.
  • In Justice League Green Arrow makes his debut in the series by disarming a thug with a well-placed arrow shot.
• Parodied in a Droopy cartoon, Homesteader Droopy. Droopy successfully shoots a gun out of the bad guy's hands. The gun then starts running around on the ground yelping in pain, and the bad guy must put it down. He didn't want to do it, but "it's the laawww of the West."
• Lucky Luke:
  • In the Animated Adaptations (Lucky Luke, The New Adventures of Lucky Luke), Luke always does this when not shooting the belt's buckle of the villains to reveal their underwear. Some examples stand out, however. Like that time he went up against the Daltons, who had just ransacked a weapon store and were armed with two pistols for Joe, a double-barrel shotgun and a gatling gun for William and a BFG and 4-barrel shotgun for Jack, and then proceeded to turn all six weapons into piles of scrap with a single shot. Or that time when he "missed" a shot during a fight with the Daltons in a mine and, a couple of minutes later, when Joe had Luke cornered, disarmed and at gunpoint outside of the mine, did a Finger Gun and said "bang"... cue the still riccocheing bullet coming flying out of the cave and down the barrel of Joe's pistol, completely disassembling it.
  • In Kid Lucky, just like he would do it as an adult, Lucky uses his slingshot to blasts other slingshots out of other kids' hands.
• Star Trek: Lower Decks: In "Envoys", Ensign Brad Boimler, who's equipped with a phaser, disarms the Ferengi in this fashion after the latter pulls a knife.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars:
  • "Rookies": When the clones storm the Rishi outpost to retake it, Rex disarms the commando droid leader this way. So it draws its vibrosword and attacks, only for Rex to dodge, break its neck and slam it face-first into the floor.
  • "Cloak of Darkness": Commander Gree does this to The Mole during a fight instead of Shooting the Valuable Hostage.
  • "A Distant Echo": Preparing to rescue Anakin Skywalker from the primitive Poletecs that have kidnapped him, Rex orders the Bad Batch to shoot to disarm only. Several Poletec warriors are thus subjected to this in the ensuing scuffle.
• Transformers: In Beast Wars, Ravage introduces himself by disarming all of the Maximals while stealth cloaked. It is ridiculously badass.

Real Life

• One of the gunmen of the 1997 North Hollywood shootout, Larry Phillips, Jr., had his gun shot by police towards the end of the incident. It was more likely a stray shot, and after he had picked it up he looked at it, and, depending on interpretation, either accidentally or intentionally shot himself.
  • It is thought that, if Philips's death was indeed an accident, the gun being shot out of his hands was an indirect cause for it; an earlier round had hit him in the other hand and broke his thumb (hence why he was using his pistol at all; his Kalashnikov had jammed, and his hand was too injured for him to fix the issue) and so he attempted to rack the slide of the gun with his mouth... with predictable results.
• Part of the reason that the 1986 FBI Miami Shootout was so disastrous: Michael Platt did this to 3 of the 8 agents, preventing them from reloading or continuing firing. Two of the three agents were gravely wounded a second time, while the third, special agent Jerry Dove was killed after being shot in the head.
• This is one of the first ideas to be completely, utterly debunked in a civilian concealed carry class. There is no such thing as a criminal who can only be wounded or disarmed. If you draw your weapon on someone, you are committed to using lethal force. No exceptions. Ever. This isn't quite as bloodthirsty as it sounds, because in most states in the US civilians can only draw on someone who is directly threatening the life or bodily integrity (maiming, rape) of them or someone in direct proximity to them, and has the means to carry out the threat. Moreover, it's tough enough to consistently hit someone in the center of mass under an adrenaline surge. Aiming for a hand or arm virtually guarantees a miss and a wounded or dead bystander.
  • That's really the best outcome, too: if you don't miss, the most likely immediate effect will be to make the person even angrier still. If you don't have lots of friends handy, or have freakish luck and nick a major blood vessel...
• Doc Holliday had an ability to do this as part of his reputation. While many of the "accounts" of his prowess are exaggerated (as is often the case in the history of the American West)...there actually are confirmed instances where he disabled opponents by shooting them in the arm or the hand! (The writer of the article believes it was purely by accident, though....)
• There's a widely-televised incident where a man waving a handgun around is threatening suicide in the street. He sits down on a lawn chair, casually drops his gun hand so it's dangling beneath him, and then looks at his hand in shock because a police sniper neatly blew the gun out of his grasp with minimal injury. Later on, in a program concerning the first example, the sniper who pulled off the shot is interviewed. He stresses how lucky and unusual the shot was, and complains about people who expect snipers to do it all the time, who tell him, "The Lone Ranger does it every week!" The shot was so great that even the wannabe suicide congratulated the sniper. The remains of the gun were also kept as a trophy◊.
• Paul Harvey once covered an incident where a cop shot the trigger off the gun. Talk about Improbable Aiming Skills.
• Dashiell Hammett tells of a lawman who combined this trope with Accidental Aiming Skills. See #14.^note Actually, read the whole thing. It's fascinating.
• During the successful liberation of the Cabanatuan POW camp in WW2-era Philippines, S/Sgt Theodore Robinson was about to shoot the lock of the gate when an enemy sniper blew his .45 sidearm out of his hand without injuring him. This was shown in the 2005 movie The Great Raid.
• In the Four Dead in Five Seconds Gunfight, Gus Krempkau managed to do this to George Campbell, hitting Campbell's gun and breaking his wrist. Campbell, in a moment of Too Dumb to Live, decided rather than continuing to run, picked up his pistol with his good hand, and was promptly shot in the stomach by Dallas Stoudenmire.
• A variation occurs in the game of paintball. If your gun is hit by a paintball, you are considered out, by virtue that your gun is "disabled" by the hit, leaving you without a weapon. Considering paintball rifles are much larger than handguns, this isn't all that difficult to pull off for seasoned players.
• There were, at one point, experimental sniper rounds that were designed to disintegrate on contact for the purposes of shooting out weapons from their wielders' hands. They didn't last due to two issues: they would either fragment too early, or they wouldn't be strong enough. The intent was a round that could disarm a suspect without the risk of ricochet, but while they worked well in testing, the reality of a situation like that is a lot more chaotic.
• The rare instances of someone actually pulling this off can actually make law enforcement and firearm instructors nervous, as it gives the public unrealistic standards of what police can do to end a situation without deadly force.

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