Basic Trope: Disarming an enemy by shooting at their weapon so it falls off their hands.
- Straight: Alice and Bob get into a Quick Draw duel. Alice's bullet hits Bob's revolver, causing it to fall off his hand and letting Alice win the duel non-fatally.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice snipes Bob's gun off his hands while they're tens of kilometers away from each other.
- Bob pulls a BFG on Alice, who blasts it off his hands with a tiny peashooter.
- Downplayed:
- Alice misses, but startles Bob into accidentally dropping his gun.
- Alice blows Bob's arm off, making him hold it in agony and unable to use his gun at all.
- Justified:
- Alice has Improbable Aiming Skills. Furthermore, she doesn't want to kill Bob, so she goes out of her way to disarm him instead.
- Alice has Improbable Aiming Skills and just wants to show off by winning the duel in a more complicated way than necessary.
- Alice doesn't have Improbable Aiming Skills, she just got lucky and fired halfway, hitting Bob's gun, before she aimed at her actual target: Bob's face.
- Inverted: Alice uses her revolver to swat Bob's bullet away.
- Subverted: The bullet connects, but the impact isn't strong enough to knock the weapon off Bob's hand.
- Double Subverted: So she just shoots it again and this time it does fall off.
- Parodied: ???
- Zig-Zagged: ???
- Averted:
- No one aims for an enemy's weapon. Everyone just aims directly at the enemy.
- No one uses ranged weapons.
- Enforced: The writers aren't allowed to kill any characters, so they ended the duel by having the loser be disarmed.
- Lampshaded: "Were you actually aiming for the gun?"
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: Carol sends Alice after Bob because she wants him alive, and knows of Alice's exceptional aim and how she has disarmed opponents with it before.
- Defied: Carol sends Alice to kill Bob, and stresses that she wants his gun to display as a trophy; thus, Alice can't shoot at Bob's gun because that risks damaging it.
- Discussed: "How good is her aim, exactly?" "Extraordinary: she could disarm you by shooting at your gun".
- Conversed: ???
- Implied: The gunshot happens offscreen. When the aftermath is shown, both characters are alive and Bob's revolver is on the ground.
- Deconstructed: ???
- Reconstructed: ???
- Played for Laughs: ???
- Played for Drama: ???
Back to Blasting It Out of Their Hands.
