Remonstrating with a Gun

"Hey man you know I'm really okay
The gun in my hand will tell you the same"

— The Offspring, "Bad Habit"

A comedy trope: Alice is wrongly suspected of being a psycho and she ends up with a gun or other weapon in her hands. Then, she tries to explain herself while holding the weapon. As she makes hand gestures, she points it at the mob around her, which recoils in terror.

Compare Point That Somewhere Else, I Just Shot Marvin in the Face and Better Manhandle the Murder Weapon. A form of Reckless Gun Usage and Not Helping Your Case.

---

Examples:

Anime and Manga

• One particularly narmful interpretation of a certain chain of events in Tatarigoroshi-hen of Higurashi: When They Cry. Keiichi trying to explain he didn't kill Rika with a bloody axe in his hands is darkly hilarious. Made worse when he chases after Satoko with it, after having explained how he killed her uncle and has been losing his mind for several days before finding Rika's body. THEN he offers to disarm himself. She pushes him off the bridge. To be fair, though, Keiichi isn't entirely sane by that point. And neither is Satoko.
• In a first season episode of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex Batou is seen waving a gun around with his finger on the trigger, which is out of character enough to tell his colleagues that the case is badly affecting him.

Film — Live-Action

• The movie Edmond has a sick subversion. During his mid-life crisis, Edmond breaks up with his wife and goes on a nightlong quest for redemption. He picks up a waitress at a bar and sleeps with her. Earlier in the night, he purchased a knife from a pawn shop, for protection, and uses the knife to stab a pimp who tried to rob him. Edmond is in the waitress' apartment, raving and ranting about... whatever. All the while, he's waving the knife around to emphasize his point. To make a long story short, he ends up brutally stabbing her to death in a fit of rage.
• The Whammyburger scene in Falling Down. Subverted in that he is a psycho; Michael Douglas' character uses the opportunity to make a stand against the fifth or sixth trivial thing that has pissed him off that day.
• In North By Northwest, Townsend is surreptitiously stabbed in the back by one of Vandamm's henchmen as he talks with Roger Thornhill at the UN. As he falls foward, Thornhill catches him, and seeing the knife pulls it out of Townsend's back. Only then does the large crowd around them notice what's happened, and the trope is duly invoked.
• Weird Science: Although not a psycho, Gary does this trope just after driving away the gang of mutant bikers from his party, gesturing casually with his rather large revolver as he talks to Wyatt and scaring the hell out of the party guests in doing so. Justified in that, due to an earlier event involving that gun, he thought it was a water pistol (this time, it wasn't, as he and a chandelier learned the hard way).

Literature

• Discworld: In Lords and Ladies, Magrat is explaining the situation to Jason Ogg, all while swinging around an unregarded battle axe.
• In the Polish novel Escape from Festung Breslau the protagonist, a German soldier, wants to get a doctor's opinion that he needs a vacation, but is morally opposed to simulating disease. His friend manipulates a visit to a particularly strict doctor in a way that leads to this trope and a diagnosis of mild breakdown. The scene itself is easily a Funny Moment.
• In one of the Psych novels, a person of interest in a murder investigation finds a bloody knife in his pocket while giving his statement; he takes the officer interviewing him hostage while claiming that someone is trying to frame him.

Live-Action TV

• Doctor Who: In "The Woman Who Fell to Earth", the Doctor, while building a new sonic screwdriver, assures Graham and Grace of her good intentions while gesticulating with a large hammer, causing the two humans to back away slowly.
• One episode of Samantha Who?? is called "The Stalker" and it's about Samantha's attempt to apologize to someone to whom she stalked in her "evil" former personality, but continually makes the situation worse. During the same episode, she tries to bond with her father by going hunting with him. Thus, she ends up explaining to the man she stalked and the crowd that she is not crazy, while pointing a rifle at him and them. Hilarity Ensues.
• Star Trek: Voyager. In "Displaced", B'Elanna Torres waves around her bat-leth while venting over a Klingon martial arts program Tom Paris has roped her into. Tom tells her to stop before she puts his eye out. When an alien unexpectedly beams on board the ship a moment later, B'Elanna gesturing at him with a giant curved blade does not reassure the alien that they mean no harm.
• Supernatural. In "Reading Is Fundamental", Kevin Tran freaks out over the Winchester's Creepy Basement with Wall of Weapons. Dean assures him he's not in a serial killer's sexual torture dungeon while brandishing a Sinister Scythe.

Music

• The Offspring song quoted above is actually Not an Example: it's about an Ax-Crazy driver with a Hair-Trigger Temper.

Video Games

• In Persona 4, Yosuke does a variant of this early in the game. After offering the main character a choice between a long sword and a dagger, Yosuke gets it into his head that he should use both, and tries a few moves. A cop sees him, and moves in to arrest Yosuke. Yosuke tries to explain himself, while still flailing about with his weapons. He and the main character end up being arrested as they decided to do this in the outdoor food-court of the local department store, and their small town had recently been struck by a series of bizarre murders. This is not the first (or last) time that Yosuke's lack of common sense gets him into (often hilarious) trouble.
• Star Wars Legends: Knights of the Old Republic has an accidental version of this due to the way cutscene motions are programmed, where if characters are equipped with weapons they will wave them around as they talk, which can result in situations like Carth saying he can't trust you while waving a blaster in each hand directly at you.

Webcomics

• The Order of the Stick: when Roy gets his sword fixed, he waves it around and muses on how he's felt incomplete without it. Cue Durkon yelling "Will you stop waving that thing around?!"

Web Original

• The G Mod Idiot Box, episode two, remakes the Falling Down scene in Garry's Mod.

Western Animation

• The Simpsons, when Homer was accused of the attempted murder of Mr. Burns. He ends up escaping police custody and holding the still-hospitalized Burns at gunpoint.
  Say I never shot you!... Before.

---