Basic Trope: A character fires their gun into the air to shut everyone else up.
- Straight: As the rest of the Five-Man Band descend further into a pointless argument, Alice draws her pistol.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice starts Firing in the Air a Lot to get everyone's attention.
- Alice uses a weapon with a very high caliber to shut everybody up, causing complains about the excessive collateral damage.
- Downplayed: Alice merely cocks her gun to get everyone's attention.
- Justified: The others can get so loud that only a gunshot can be heard over their arguments.
- Inverted: The Five-Man Band is shooting at each other loudly, and Alice yells a Big "SHUT UP!" at them to get them to stop.
- Subverted: Alice pulls her gun out... and starts Pistol-Whipping the table like a judge with a gavel.
- Double Subverted: ...And when that doesn't work, Alice fires the gun into the air.
- Parodied:
- Alice fires a minigun into the air to shut her team up.
- Alice breaks out a railway cannon to shut everybody up. The humongous boom knocks everybody off their feet and they spend the rest of the scene completely deaf.
- Alice, who has taken in the horrors of a war at began out of a shipping dispute (as in, two Shippers on Deck coming to blows) with the straight-lacedness of Droopy, tells both sides to cut it out with a Big "SHUT UP!" and a nuclear explosion punctuating her shout.
- Zig-Zagged: Continuing from Double Subverted, this fails to work because of Alice's pistol's integrated silencer.
- Enforced: The writer uses this as Alice's Establishing Character Moment.
- Lampshaded: "Jeez, Alice, save your ammo for the bad guys."
- Invoked: "If those idiots start arguing again, I'm shooting a hole in the ceiling."
- Defied: Bob sneakily takes Alice's gun out of it's holster before she can draw it, or delivers a Big "SHUT UP!" when he sees her reaching for it.
- Implied: The heroes' meeting room has a ceiling full of bullet holes, pretty much all of them above Alice's chair.
- Deconstructed:
- Bob ends up getting pissed at how much money he spends on patching up his ceiling.
- Alice's gunshot only causes the group to erupt into complete panic, leading to a stampede to get away from her, people trying to attack her in self defense, people fainting/becoming shell-shocked, people dying or getting hurt as collateral damage, and obviously the noise not stopping.
- Alice ends up being arrested for breaking firearms laws because she discharged her weapon in a situation that was neither self-defense (by the very strict definitions set by defense laws) or recreational.
- Reconstructed: Alice starts using blanks.
- Played for Laughs:
- Alice does this with a paintball gun.
- Alice fires her gun into the ceiling. A chunk of the ceiling promptly drops on her head, knocking her out.
- Alice fires her gun into the air and does a pithy one-liner about not wishing to hurt anybody. A duck or some random bystander standing overhead immediately reports that she hurt them/come crashing down. Alice amends her one-liner with a hesitant "…as of now."
- Played for Drama:
- We later learn that the bullet killed someone on the way down. Alice is put on trial for manslaughter.
- Alice is sued for attempted assault with a deadly weapon and Convicted by Public Opinion as a trigger-happy maniac waiting for a chance to freely commit murder, even when Alice made sure to not point that thing at anybody and all she wanted (and makes clear under oath) was for them to shut up!.
- The first thing Alice says after filling the ceiling with lead is "you make me do this again, and the next one's going to go through your heads".
- Played for Horror: Alice kills two birds with one stone by shooting someone dead, preferably via blowing their brains out - that idiot goon, the cute child hostage, that damn dog who won't shut up, whatever. Bonus points if she then uses the first few seconds after everybody has shut up horrified at Alice's casual use of murder to threaten further death on anybody who makes noise, or do some pithy joke regarding everybody being too noisy.
Back to "Shut Up!" Gunshot
