Throw-Away Guns

Looks like the pistols are out of ammo. Time to get automatic.

"I have more bullets you know. You gotta stop doing that!"
"I know. It just looks so cool."

"Well, go get it!"
—The Venture Brothers

The habit of characters in action shows to simply throw away guns when they run out of ammunition during a gunfight. Even the poorest of combatants will dispose of a gun by dumping it as soon as it goes dry. The logic seems to be that it is more important to maintain a steady rate of fire than it is to conserve resources such as weapons.

Of course, it's also getting tossed away if it happens to jam, because in Hollywood there's no way to fix that.

Never mind that guns are expensive, especially the ones carried by the Big Bad or by our intrepid hero(es). Or that, if you're trying to keep your identity concealed from someone (the vigilante-hating police, for example), you just left an object coated in your fingerprints for them to find (although that is an overrated risk: see Fingerprinting Air).

The Cop Show variation is that no one thinks twice when a cop loses his gun or has it stolen by the Big Bad (except when it becomes a plot point, such as the cop getting shot with his own gun). When this happens in real life, it's a serious affair resulting in tons of paperwork, formal reprimands and IAD investigations. Repeat offenses result in suspensions and dismissal. Ditto in the military; if you lose your assigned weapon somehow, it can be cause to shut down the entire base.

When Mooks face a Superhero they often fire all available rounds at the superhero, look at their now-useless gun (Oh, if they had if only remembered reloads!), then throw the gun at the hero either in frustration, stupidity, or desperation, although this is much more likely to happen against an Immortal Assassin by a victim, and almost always perpetrated by someone wielding a small gun, since larger weapons are more often used to attempt melee combat (given the materials they're made of, most rifles and shotguns make for rather efficient bludgeons).

Hilariously, in live-action depictions the immune-to-bullets superhero may then quickly duck to avoid getting clocked by the empty pistol, implying that the gun itself is more harmful than the bullets it fires. And while this may be true if someone is a bad shot, but is capable throwing things, that would only raise further questions... Like why they don't just grab a rock...

This is in certain settings and historically a legitimate strategy. Most early guns could only fire once and took a long time to reload. Carrying around multiple loaded weapons can be the most practical way to get off more than one shot in situations where reloading is just not possible. Oddly enough, it seems to be least commonly used in settings where it makes sense. Also, never mind the fact that most combatants of the era running around with multiple one shot pistols didn't throw away pistols after use, but stored them away to be reloaded and reused later. Guns are expensive after all, and finding replacements in the middle of a war when demand is so high is far from simple.

See Shooting Superman.

Examples of Throw-Away Guns include:

Anime and Manga

  • Meryl Strife from Trigun did this to an extreme, with dozens of one-shot derringer pistols lining her cloak, which she'd go through quite rapidly in a gunfight. On occasion, Wolfwood was also shown using a large supply of pistols, tossing each away when they ran out to grab a new one.
    • Comically, after a barrage of derringer shots, Milly is seen picking up all of Meryl's discarded guns.
  • Done in RahXephon during the End of the World Special. In the ultimate futility, the thrown pistol doesn't even REACH the target!
  • Barnett of Vandread does this to at least five different weapons of the course of an episode, since she does have to keep firing constantly, or risk being overrun. However, as the end of the episode she gets very cheesed off that she can't recover the weapons, since they're incredibly rare in this time period.
  • In the original Mobile Suit Gundam, Amuro had a tendency to toss away the beam rifle when it expended its ammo, but this is justified since it could only be recharged on the ship. In later series, smaller, magazine-style energy packs for the beam rifles are introduced allowing them to be reloaded on the fly & this trope becomes much less prevalent.
  • Daddy Masterson from One Piece carries 30 flintlock pistols under his coat. Justified in that he wouldn't have the time to properly reload them during a fight, but we have seen more practical guns in the series.
  • In Digimon Frontier MagnaGarurumon throws his BFG when its out of ammo to bring out its lightsabers.
  • Mami from Puella Magi Madoka Magica does so with her summoned rifles - summon a rifle from a thin air, shoot, discard, repeat. Well, that or do Unlimited Musket Works.


Comic Books

  • Done by The Joker to Batman in the former's very first appearance.
  • In Gotham Central, Detective Romy Chandler blames Batman for the death of her partner, Detective Nate Patton. When she and her new partner stumble upon Batman interrogating the Penguin, she draws her gun and fires. Batman survives, but he takes her gun and vanishes from the room. Reality Ensues as the fact that a police officer has lost her gun, after shooting Batman on top of everything, becomes a matter of great concern for her and the police department at large, especially when another detective slips and accidentally mentions the theft to their captain. Thankfully, before it can spin too far out of control Robin returns the gun, passing along the message that Chandler should not shoot Batman again.
  • Supergirl mocks someone who tries this on her by briefly collapsing to the floor as though the empty gun had knocked her out, after the contents of the gun had already been emptied at her without result.
  • Mad did a Peanuts parody of sorts telling about the Red Baron's encounters with Snoopy from the Baron's viewpoint. He came back from one flight grumbling that he'd emptied his plane's machineguns at "the Beagelhund" (yes, it's not correct German), then emptied his pistol, then threw the pistol. "He fetched it!"


Film

  • The numerous occurrences in The Matrix are more forgivable, since the dozens of guns abandoned were conjured up from computer code, and vanish without a trace when the programmed reality is "reformatted". Also, it's quite clear Neo and Trinity planned to do this from the start, since they correctly figured there would be no time to reload.
    • Heroic Bloodshed movies, from which The Matrix takes inspiration, have characters doing this all the time when a gun goes empty, jams up, or otherwise can't be used anymore, throwing the gun away and then grabbing another off a dead bad guy or a potted plant or a nearby table and continuing the gunfight. Many such characters carry a gym bag, suitcase, guitar case, or other big carry-all full of guns to final showdowns, whether it's launching a major assault (like in A Better Tomorrow II) or heading off a major siege (like in The Killer).
    • A notable aversion to this trope is seen in one of the later battles in Equilibrium (the one that looks fairly similar to the famous "lobby scene" of The Matrix), where Preston throws weighted magazines on the floor as he walks in so he can just reload by crouching.
  • In the 2006 version of Casino Royale, a bad guy throws his empty gun at James Bond. Bond promptly catches it and throws it back. Into his face. The clip is #7 of Cracked.com's "The 17 Most Unintentionally Hilarious Movie Fight Scenes".
  • The zombie horror/comedy Undead hangs a giant neon lampshade on this. The Badass never reloads, instead whipping out a fresh pair of pistols after every barrage, to the point of ridiculousness. This goes unmentioned until he spends several minutes naked, finds new clothing in a thrift store, and at the first sight of zombies, whips two Desert Eagles out of Hammerspace, prompting another character to ask, "Where've you been keeping them, then?"
  • The Cop Show variant is reversed in Akira Kurosawa's "Stray Dog", which begins with the main character reporting the theft of his sidearm , and follows his efforts to track down and recover the gun.
    • Much like the Hong Kong film P.T.U.. A member of the Police Tactical Unit loses his piece during a bust, and his colleagues spend a whole evening looking for it to save him from the bureaucratic consequences he'd otherwise face when he reported it.
  • In The Boondock Saints, Il Duce challenges all three saints to a firefight while wearing a waistcoat with six handguns. Each time a pair of handguns runs out of ammo he just drops them and pulls out another pair. Of course, the cops investigating after the fact are Wrong Genre Savvy and reasonably assume that it had to be at least six guys with guns.

Detective Greenly: What if it was just one guy with six guns?

  • In the opening battle at Hamunaptra in The Mummy 1999, O'Connell fires Guns Akimbo at a number of bad guys. He runs out of bullets...then drops the pistols, draws two more from their holsters, and keeps firing. The French service revolvers he was using were loaded via a gate at the back of the cylinder, like a Colt Single Action Army revolver, requiring much more time to reload than even modern revolvers.
    • Someone runs out of bullets shooting Imhotep and then throws their gun at Imhotep. Like that's any more likely to work than the actual bullets that didn't work?
    • Johnathan uses O'Connell's revolvers during the mummy fight and tosses the empty revolvers at them with no effect.
  • Justified in the final chase scene of The Last of the Mohicans (the 1992 film starring Daniel Day-Lewis) when Hawkeye fires, throws away and picks up rifles in succession, since these are single shot and take too long to reload. Further, it's ENEMY rifles he's using after they've killed their owners who failed to shoot back as he and Chingachgook hunt down the Big Bad.
  • Parodied in the 1985 comedy/adventure film adaptation of King Solomons Mines. The female character throws a gun at the villain; he shouts: "Thank you!" and uses it to blast away at her.
  • Justified twice in Unforgiven - Clyde carries three guns because he only has one hand, which makes reloading impossible for him. "I just don't wanna get killed for lack of shootin' back." In the final shootout, William Munny throws his shotgun at Little Bill after it misfires with its second and final shot. When Bill instinctively tries to block it, doing so interferes with him drawing his pistol. By the time Bill recovers, Munny already has his pistol out and gets off a couple of rounds at Little Bill.
  • Played straight, then lampshaded, then inverted in Grosse Pointe Blank - Martin Blank and rival hitman Grocer end up in a Mexican Standoff across a kitchen counter, only to find that they're both empty. They toss their guns away, and Grocer pulls out a fresh one while teasing Blank when it's apparent that he's all out - "So, what are you gonna do? You gonna THROW that gun at me? How 'bout this? How 'bout I sell you a piece for a hundred Gs?" Grocer tosses a loaded gun past Blank's cover and jumps out to shoot him only for Blank to smash his head with a nearby television and electrocute him.
  • John McClane did this several times in the first Die Hard movie.
  • Jason Bourne in The Bourne Series frequently breaks apart and discards weapons he's used, including the hunting shotgun in the first film and the handgun in the third film's Waterloo Station fight, presumably to prevent people using them against him and/or delay forensics by, what, a half-hour?
  • In Joss Whedon's original script for Alien: Resurrection, one of the smugglers was supposed to carry plastic guns that were made to be disposable. In his final Last Stand, he was supposed to eject a number of pistols from his sleeves and discard them as they ran out of ammo. None of this made it into the final film.[1]
    • It did make it into the novelisation though.
  • Somewhat played for comedy in Versus, where the weaselly crook is always losing his pistols for various reasons, only to pull out yet another pistol from Hammerspace.
  • Justified in Tremors when a giant man-eating Sand Worm breaks into the basement of the Crazy Survivalist and his wife. Seizing one firearm after another from their Wall of Weapons, they blast away at the creature which is only a few feet away—sometimes reloading, but other times tossing the gun aside and grabbing a more powerful weapon. At all other times in the movie the two show proper weapons handling.
    • Being fair to them though, they are in their basement. It's not like they can't pick up the weapons once they finish killing the worm.
  • The Naked Gun goes even further than its TV predecessor, Police Squad!. When someone runs out of ammo during a shoot-out, they toss their empty handgun at the opponent. Police and baddies keep emptying their guns at the same time...
  • The only time Defendor carries a gun into a battle he ends up just throwing it and knocking someone senseless.
  • The title character in Big Jake does this at one point, but it is probably justified- out of ammo, he was aiming for his assailant, hoping to slow him down in a life-or-death situation and thereby buy himself enough time to finish the guy off. He would have been easily able to retrieve the gun, once the assailant had been dispatched.
  • In Wanted, Wesley does this, during his major assault on the bad guy headquarters. Why reload your gun when you can take the guns from your dead enemies?
  • Possibly parodied in the original The Blob, when a four-year-old boy "shoots" the Blob Monster repeatedly with a cap pistol and then (of course!) throws the toy gun away. Presumably he'd seen this trope in action on Superman shorts and cowboy flicks...
  • Sgt. Horvath in Saving Private Ryan. He and a German soldier point their rifles at each other point blank, and both are empty. In a moment of Black Comedy they both drop their rifles and throw their helmets at each other, then start racing to unholster their pistols. Horvath wins.
  • An odd example occurs in Billy the Kid vs. Dracula. The vampire proves immune to bullets, walking forward slowly while the shots apparently pass through him. Billy then hurls his revolver into his face, promptly knocking the vampire on his ass.
  • Staff Sgt Nantz in Battle: Los Angeles runs out of ammunition for his automatic rifle while chasing retreating aliens and reflexively tosses it aside, draws his pistol and keeps on firing.
  • Averted in the opening Car Chase of The Transporter when a French policeman empties his revolver after the protagonist's rapidly-departing car. The cop is about to throw down his gun in frustration when he realises what he's doing...and throws down his cap instead. The trope is played straight in later scenes though.
  • Posse has a scene where the two combatants advance slowly in a Showdown At High Noon, attacking with Throw-Away Guns.
  • Near the end of Angels with Dirty Faces, Rocky throws his empty guns at the police in desperation.

Literature

  • The Dresden Files has Kincaid, who claims to be a perfectly normal hired mercenary[2] who's just very, very good at his job. In Death Masks, he produces a golf-bag full of double-barreled shotguns which he discards after firing one shell through each barrel, because said rounds are Dragon's Breath rounds, which fire a 20 foot plume of flame. He explains that this is hot enough to melt the barrel, so he can't shoot more than one through any given shotgun or else they'd explode. This is why those rounds aren't used very much in real life.
  • Averted in the Jerry Ahern novel The Takers when the protagonist (an action novelist and gunwriter) is told to throw down his guns, he quotes from a Western. "I won't throw down my weapons, I'll set them down."
  • Uther Doul in China Mieville's The Scar actually manages to use this effectively. He can throw an empty flintlock with enough force and accuracy to kill someone.
  • In Tim Powers' On Stranger Tides, Hurwood assists the pirate attack by firing one pistol after another, pulling the guns from bandoleers and dropping them after use. Justified because Hurwood has only one arm and would be slowed down immensely if he paused to re-holster each weapon.
  • Justified in The Godfather. Michael Corleone is given a untraceable, unfingerprintable revolver and is told to just drop it next to the dead bodies. The reasoning is that, if Michael is caught at the scene, the mafia will be able to "fix" any eyewitnesses so that Michael can say he was just at the scene. However, there's nothing they can do if the murder weapon is found in his pocket.
  • In The Shadow pulps, the Shadow is terrible about tossing away his automatics whenever they're empty. One reviewer speculated that the hundreds of empty handguns left by the vigilante might be the cause of New York's gun problem.


Live Action TV

  • Lampooned in an episode of Police Squad!!, where both the cops and the villains throw their guns away after they run out of bullets in a shoot-out—and someone gets clonked on the head by a thrown gun, because both sides were only about six feet apart. In a different episode, once the gun-throwing starts, both sides have a large supply of empty firearms to toss.
  • Bones refreshingly does this right, with Booth getting in serious trouble when he loses his gun, and even complaining about having to fill in forms for rounds fired off by Brennan.
  • Ditto for Homicide: Life on the Street. After a couple of suspects beat Sheppard to the ground and take her gun, then use it to shoot at Lewis, he warns a club full of angry West Indians of what will happen if it isn't returned. Namely: the entire Baltimore police department will come down on the neighborhood like a ton of bricks. The gun comes back later that night.
  • Farscape. Crichton throws away his second pulse pistol after it too shortly runs out of oil (bullets) in the groups escape from the Peacekeepers on Arnessk.
  • Played with in an episode of Due South: While aboard a hijacked freighter crossing the Great Lakes Chicago cop Ray asks Mountie Benton to grab the gun of a knocked-out hijacker. Benton refuses because he isn't permitted to fire a gun in American waters, but Ray tells him "You don't have to use it, just carry it." Later, confronting another one of the hijackers, Benton disables him by throwing the same gun at his head. Ray responds, "You shoot a gun. Who in the hell throws a gun?"
    • Of course, once they cross over into Canadian territorial waters, Ray tosses his gun to Fraser, who is a much better shot.
  • Averted by Lost: Sawyer holds onto the marshal's empty gun, which comes in handy when ammo is located. He also spends the latter part of season 3 wielding an empty gun to bluff people (with mixed success.)
    • The jammed-gun variant is also averted in season 4. Keamy's gun jams (because the island won't let him kill Michael) and he gives it to Capt. Gault to fix, which he does.
  • The cop losing the gun was averted in The Wire: when an injured cop's gun is stolen, one of the detectives spends nearly half the season tracking it down.
  • On The Bridge when a cop is assaulted and his gun taken, the protagonists pull out all the stops to find it since the cop would be in major trouble if the gun is used in a crime.
  • In the Firefly episode "War Stories", Zoe tells Wash "Six shots, then throw it away." as she hands him a pistol. Her husband is however inexperienced with firearms, so it would probably make more sense than teaching him to load in the short time they have.
  • All versions of Star Trek are pretty bad about the losing-military-weapons version. Between standoffs, captures, and accidents, they lose a lot of phasers. Considering that a phaser on maximum power can completely obliterate a soft target and explode rock like a blasting charge, you would expect them to show more concern.
    • Worse, in some cases the locals might be able to reverse-engineer and duplicate the technology. This issue was raised about a lost communicator at the end of "A Piece Of The Action".
  • In Married... with Children, Al makes fun of a Superman movie he is watching, calling the random mook an idiot when he throws his gun at Superman just after all of the bullets bounced off him.
  • Lampshaded in an episode of How I Met Your Mother, Robin goes to a shooting range to cool off after breaking up with Barney. She is shown violently shooting at her target and once out of bullets, she actually throws the gun.
  • Averted in The Walking Dead as guns and ammunition are both rare and invaluable in a Zombie Apocalypse scenario. However there have been a few exceptions where weapons have not been seen again due to unspecified reasons.
  • In the second episode of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, Animate Inanimate Objects start attacking everyone, and Sanchez pulls out his gun and shoots the floating objects down. Then his gun tries to wrench itself around to shoot him, so he throws it to the ground, stomps on it, pulls out a second pistol, and starts shooting the first gun with it. Then he throws the second gun at one of the floating objects, and it spins around in midflight to chase after him.


Newspaper Comics

  • In Modesty Blaise, Willie "couldn't hit Venice with a pistol" but still managed to take down a bad guy with one - by throwing it.


Video Games

  • Characters in Xenophobe can only carry one gun, so discarding your gun for a better one is important. Oddly though, you want to remember where your old gun was because guns have a tendency to explode when dropped and you might want to go back for your old one. In some versions you also get points for dropping your gun, which can lead to repeatedly dropping many guns until they explode!
  • In the Metal Slug series of games your character ditches special weapons when the clip empties, reverting to your starting pistol.
    • Official art depicts most of the weapons as the underslung part of the gun that is carried when a Special weapon is used. Which makes even less sense, as although the secondary weapon may be used up, there is still a perfectly good assault rifle right there.
  • The few firearms available in Dead Rising are discarded when Frank runs out of ammo. This makes sense, as you don't really have time to tote around empty guns in the middle of a Zombie Apocalypse.
  • You can do this with the ray guns in the Super Smash Bros.. games along with the super-scope and any other item. (In a sense, this is justified, because in this case, you really can't reload them) If you hit your opponents with them, it does damage.
    • From most ranges, throwing the guns is actually faster than shooting them, and in some cases a thrown gun is more dangerous as well.
  • One cutscene in Mass Effect has Saren tossing aside his assault rifle and approaching to attempt to strangle Shepard. Other than that one scene, though, nobody ever drops a gun in the entire saga. The inventory mechanics require you to have one of every type of gun you can use (in the second game) or one of every type (even if you can't use it, in the first game) equipped.
  • The First Person Shooters Area 51 and The Darkness use this in one of the circumstances where it's actually a realistic response—when using Guns Akimbo. Reloading two weapons at once is clumsy at best and impossible at worst, so the empty weapon really is just dead weight. Of course, the realism of Guns Akimbo in general is specious at best.
    • Although, in The Darkness, Jackie keeps hold of one pair of pistols, the custom ones that were given to him at the start of the game as a birthday present. They're always the last pair of guns he pulls out, so he must hang on to them and reload them at some point.
  • In the Halo series, most Covenant energy weapons run from a power cell which Humanity does not know how to recharge or replace. This leads to swapping guns with your dead enemies as a necessity, even sifting through the bodies to find the best one.
    • Another Bungie game, Marathon, has the alien weapon, which is totally new to humanity. In fact, it's justified because you can't even tell how much ammo you have, let alone reload.
  • Condemned takes it one notch further: it's an FPS that doesn't have a reload key. Once a gun is emptied, it is promptly and automatically discarded. Even though you may wind up with one gun with 4 bullets in it in your inventory and another one with 3 on the ground, there is no way to top the first off with the ammo from the second (especially weird considering you can take the magazine out to visually note how many more bullets are in it). That also goes for shotguns. Thus, the CSI protagonist mostly relies on braining people with 2x4s, rebars and lead pipes.
    • The sequel thankfully allows you to carry one spare firearm in a holster after completing a certain stage (But only if you complete it with a certain amount of competence - finding secrets, getting good clues, and making informative theories), and before that, you are allowed to reload your current gun with the ammunition from the weapon on the ground and in safes.
    • Firearms in Dead Rising are the exact same way; they come with a preloaded amount of ammo, cannot be topped off, and are discarded upon running out. Luckily you CAN carry several fully-loaded copies of the same weapon, and the magazine capacities of these guns are fairly generous.
    • Similarly, the ambitious but godawful game Jurassic Park: Trespasser had non-reloadable guns, explained by the heroine having a broken left arm. How she is able to fire an assault rifle on full auto one-handed, especially with any semblance of accuracy, is not.
  • In Mirror's Edge, using a gun is not really the best way to play. Runners, like the player character Faith, use their agility and acrobatics to fend off attack. When carrying a gun, Faith's agility is hampered, depending on the gun size and handedness. A pistol retains your use of both hands (to climb and vault) but mildly hampers your acceleration and jump. Anything larger than that, like a rifle, does kill your ability to jump and vault and wallrun, and your max running speed is completely nuked. An M249 machine gun is the worst - you're forced to walk and you jump like a Goomba, if at all.
    • One Achievement/Trophy involves not firing a gun for the entire game. This is made extremely difficult when, for example, you're trying to avoid being killed by snipers. Normally, you'd take one out, grab his gun, and snipe the other snipers. If you're trying for this trophy...you can't do that.
    • A sizable part of the fan base see the guns as an unnecessary distraction anyway, so it's not as big a deal to the game as a whole as it might sound.
  • Played straight and subverted in MDK2 with Max the four armed dog throwing away most of this weapons once he runs out of ammo, luckily there is always a good supply of guns lying around. Subverted as Max has four weak guns with unlimited ammo which never leaves his hands, unless he dies.
  • Karen's higher level Flash Drives in Luminous Arc 2 consist in emptying a pistol, two uzis and a bazooka upon the target, discarding them once they click empty.
  • In Dead to Rights, protagonist Jack apparently dislikes reloading guns. He can max out his ammo by picking up more of the same gun, but instead of putting in a new clip, in true Hong Kong action style, he'll throw away his guns and pull out two new ones. If he's using a two-handed weapon like a shotgun or a submachine gun, he'll reload that, however. This is at least partially justified, however, as every enemy in the game will eventually shoot at him, and it's presumably easier for him to just throw away his gun and pick up another. Or violently disarm some guy and kill him with his own gun.
  • Nick Kang in True Crime: Streets of L.A. can fire all Guns Akimbo, but throws them away at the drop of a hat; when entering a car, when entering a building, when attempting to holster. He always returns to his issue sidearms, which are also wielded akimbo, have unlimited ammo, and can get upgraded to deadly enough power to make the other guns superfluous.
  • The guns in BloodRayne just offer another variation for killing, and are discarded by Rayne as soon as they're empty, or when other guns are picked up.
  • Used and subverted in Die Hard Arcade. If one of the players runs out of ammo for a gun, they'll either reload it if they have another magazine, or throw it at the enemies if they don't. Oddly enough, players can carry only two pistols (no Guns Akimbo here, though - they'll just draw the second gun when the first gun runs out) and as many magazines as they can find. Not only that, if they die, a gun falls out of their body at the continue screen.
    • The gun-throwing thing gets rather annoying, however - if you have a pistol you can arrest mooks (put them in handcuffs) which is an instant kill. Why can't you keep an empty gun around to threaten mooks with?
  • In Scribblenauts, any weapon you create will have 1 to 5 shots, after which Maxwell will throw them to the ground... where they then turn into a puff of smoke.
  • Alex Mercer from Prototype doesn't bother holding onto reloads for the guns he pilfers from the military, tossing the firearms away instead.
    • Almost justified, in that with all the marines around and his own talents, acquiring a new weapon is probably faster than reloading one. However, when you do this in disguise while infiltrating a military base, one wonders why the marines are not perturbed by Sgt. John Doe throwing his fully loaded missile launcher to the ground.
    • The actual military doesn't let go of their weapons for anything. Grab a marine by the throat, run up the side of a skyscraper, and take the fall. He'll still have his gun when you land.
  • Bayonetta goes through an entire casket full of guns in a single cutscene. She sticks with the final pair for the rest of the battle, and makes them have infinite ammo because she can do that.
    • It's mentioned in the gun's description that she can do that, but needs to keep her own power in check to avoid destroying the guns.
    • It also helps that the casket of guns were all normal firearms, while Scarborough Fair (the infinite ammo guns) are specifically created to utilize her magic.
  • Modern Warfare has an example of this if you use cheats - when you're supposed to shoot Zakhaev at the very end, he will attempt to shoot back at you with his Desert Eagle. If you use god mode to survive his shots, after he fires seven times he'll drop the gun and pull out another one. Another seven shots from that, he drops it too, and then pulls out an M1911 with infinite ammo instead.
    • In the World War II-based games in the Call of Duty series, the player is often forced to drop whatever weapons he started levels with for German ones simply because, with rare exceptions, there's no way to replenish the ammo for the former without actively letting your allies die.
  • Sengoku Basara has Saika Magoichi, who wields pistols, magnums, shotguns, machineguns, and rocket launchers. After some of her moves, she throws some of the weapons away and pulls out fresh ones to use. Even in the post-victory cutscene, you can see tons of discarded guns lying around.
  • Zeno Clash: Weapons are quite situational, and often it's a viable tactic to throw whatever you're holding at your foes instead, staggering them briefly and dealing a small amount of damage.
  • Averted in BioShock (series); because you only ever get 1 of every gun in the game and ammo is actually pretty easy to come by, running out of ammo with a weapon simply means it won't fire. Although quite frankly, if you ever run completely out of ammo for the practical weapons like the machine gun or the shotgun, you're clearly doing something wrong.
  • Done in the 3D Grand Theft Auto games. As long as you have at least 1 bullet left, you keep the gun, but once you have no ammo you throw it away. This causes some annoyance if you want to buy more ammo, as you'll have to fork out for an entirely new gun as well, though most of the time ammo is plentiful anyway.
  • Used as a mechanic in Borderlands 2. There are guns that you literally pick up, fire their one magazine, and then throw at the enemy upon which a new gun warps into your hand.


Web Comics


Web Animation

  • Hank in Madness Combat tends to go through guns and ammo at an amazing rate. This never holds him up too badly, though, since he resupplies himself from slain Mooks. For some reason, he prefers to take the least-sensible weapons available - given one dead mook with an axe and another with a never-fired AK-47, he'll take the axe.
    • Why does he not take the gun when given the choice between that and an axe? Because he's a Badass, that's why.


Western Animation

  • In the Aeon Flux short Tide, a character tries to shoot Aeon, before realizing she has no bullets. In desperation, she throws the gun. It works. Peter Chung designed that bit to see an instance where it actually was effective.
  • Elisa in Gargoyles had her service weapon destroyed by gargoyles/monsters/cyborgs at least 3 times, yet never suffers any on-screen reprimand for losing them, assuming she claimed they were lost. It's unlikely she told her superiors in the NYPD what was really happening to them.
    • Considering Elisa is a detective its likely that the guns that were destroyed were her own guns and not the standard issue from the police department. in the U.S. many detectives, especially the older ones who still use revolvers, will often use non-standard firearms for various personal reasons.
  • Parodied in The Venture Brothers episode "Escape to the House of Mummies, Part II". A mook throws his empty gun at Brock and is admonished by a fellow mook with "We have more bullets ya' know. You really need to stop doing that, now go get it!"
  • Parodied in The Simpsons in which Comic Book Guy (playing a villain named The Collector) tries to shoot Bart (Stretch Dude) numerous times with a phaser. Bart is easily able to avoid all shots with his elasticity, but is taken down in a second when Collector throws the phaser.
    • In an earlier episode, Chief Wiggum was mad at what he was hearing on the tv, and misses three shots at it to turn it off. His wife tells him to use the remote (in his gun holster), but the channel he turns it to is even more infuriating, and he throws the gun at the tv and actually succeeds in breaking it.
  • An episode of Justice League Unlimited had Wonder Woman deflecting bullets from a common mook with her bracelets. When he goes to throw the gun at her, even after seeing not a single shot hit, she sarcastically says to him, "Oh yeah...like that's gonna work."
  • In the subplot of one episode of the 2002 He-Man and the Masters of the Universe series, Queen Marlena is ambushed by snakemen. Due to the technical problems that make up the main plot of the episode, her gun doesn't fire. Instead, she throws it at them... and it knocks one of them down.


Tabletop Games

  • Warhammer Fantasy Battle has a Regiment of Renown (a mercenary unit) of Dwarf death seeker pirates. They have a special rule, "Festooned with pistols", allowing them to use pistols in each turn of combat.
    • Doesn't mean those are disposable, however. It's a fairly obvious Shout-Out to the (in)famous Blackbeard's harness.
  • The full-round reloading time in Hong Kong Action Theatre seems designed to encourage this among players, since many Hong Kong action characters will dump their guns once they're out of bullets and either draw or grab new ones to continue the gunfight or turn the situation into a kung fu battle.
  • Seriously averted in Warhammer 40,000. No Guardsman would ever throw away their weapon unless it was too damaged to be usable. This is because Guard regulations state that losing one's weapon is a crime, potentially (And usually) punishable by summary execution. As a result of this, Guardsmen tend to take their rifles everywhere.

Real Life

  • Real Life example—In the days of single-shot muzzle loading ball and powder pistols, it was quite common for gunfighters to wear bandoliers of preloaded guns in order to fend off numerous foes in heated firefights. This was done in order to avoid the lethally longwinded (and unreliable) procedure of reloading one's pistols in the heat of combat.
    • It should still be noted that the guns still weren't simply thrown away, if a guy could afford multiple pistols he would tie them by strings to either his belt or around his neck and just let them hang after he fired; no point staying alive after one fight if you don't have any guns left for the next one. Though if you win the fight, you can always pick up any discarded guns (not to mention the dead enemies' guns).
    • More modern examples were derringers like the FP-45 Liberator and the Deer Gun.
      • In both cases, the gun was intended for covert usage by guerrillas and resistance movements, for the purpose of obtaining better weaponry from enemy soldiers - shoot one, take his gun - so they act, in an oddly roundabout way, as an aversion of this trope.
    • In addition, there's the concept of the "New York Reload"—dropping one gun when it runs out of ammo and then drawing another—which is common among those who use revolvers, due to the longer reload time compared to a semiautomatic, but which is getting less frequent because of moon clips and speedloaders. New York policemen, when equipped with revolvers, used to do this - they carried a second revolver precisely so in a tense situation they could simply grab a fresh gun and drop the old one, a decisive advantage when all you have is six shots.
    • This trope is invoked in Real Life by the Panzerfaust (and later anti-tank rockets like the American LAW and AT-4). The weapon was literally designed to be a cheap, throwaway weapon, discarded after a single use.
    • The FGM-148 Javelin is similar. It is an anti-tank weapon that comes in two parts, the launch tube and the Command Launch Unit. In use, the launch tube is meant to attach to the CLU, be fired, then detach to make room for the next one (video games like Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots and Modern Warfare, though, typically have the user just toss the entire assembly away and pull a fully-formed new one out of nowhere).
  • The Walther P38/P1 used by the German army from 1939 to 2000 was infamous for its complicated construction and temperamental nature, especially the P1 with its "improvement" of a lighter aluminum frame. Many German soldiers described its firepower as "eight warning shots and one aimed throw." It was also notorious for having a ludicrously heavy double action trigger pull (as in, 15-25 pounds!), which probably contributed to the claims of inaccuracy.
    • There have apparently been similar descriptions given to the Browning Hi-Power, though unless the user makes serious mistakes, e.g. continuously shooting 9mm + P+ using stock recoil spring and guide rod, they are extremely reliable (though not necessarily accurate).
  • Instructors sent to train the Afghan National Army have reported that even supposedly experienced men were all too prone to respond to a jammed weapon by throwing it away and looking for a replacement - and running away if one was not forthcoming.
  • Contrary to portrayals in movies such as Enemy at the Gates, the Soviets at the Battle of Stalingrad did not have weapon shortages. Quite the opposite, in fact: while weapons were plentiful, ammunition was scarce, sometimes a mere 5 rounds per soldier. Once this ammunition was expended, it was not uncommon for the rifle to be abandoned.
  • From the same war, this was what lead to the Sten submachine gun's existence - in mid-1940, British forces in the European theater were forced to make a hasty retreat back to their home territory, and left a lot of guns behind. While replacing their domestically-made Lee-Enfields and Bren guns would be no problem, their SMG of choice had primarily been American-made Thompsons, which would have been much harder to replace as America was gearing up for war themselves.
  • A slight variation of this in real life is called the "tactical transition", where a shooter allows their primary weapon (such as a carbine) drop while wearing a sling and immediately switches to their pistol. It should be noted that they are not discarding their primary weapon as it is still hanging from them by their sling. This is only really used when someone absolutely needs to keep shooting immediately (such as covering a buddy while he is in mid-reload.) Example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9tAaTf7RM8&feature=related (first 10 seconds or so)
  1. ↑ Probably because disposable guns are a prime example of Cool but Stupid, since if a gun is built solidly enough to handle conventional ammunition in the first place, then it may as well be reusable, too.
  2. ↑ he's actually-- probably-- half-demon; at least, he's written up that way in the RPG
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