Ate His Gun

The world's least healthy diet.

"Dwayne held the muzzle of his gun in his mouth for a while. He tasted oil. The gun was loaded and cocked. There were neat little metal packages containing charcoal, potassium nitrate and sulphur only inches from his brains. He had only to trip a lever, and the powder would turn to gas. The gas would blow a chunk of lead down a tube and through Dwayne's brains."

— Breakfast of Champions

There are lots of ways to do yourself in: jump off a bridge, hanging, stick your head in the oven. One popular method in the USA and Hollywood is to wrap your lips around the barrel of your favorite firearm, and pull the trigger.^note This being part of the reason why Americans have fewer suicidal and depressed people than other developed countries - their average suicide attempt is about 50% lethal, versus less than 10% for the rest of the developed world (deliberate drug overdose having an average lethality of 2-3%, versus bullet to the brain at 90%+). This is because half their suicide attempts are with firearms, this rate also mirroring their rate of firearms-ownership (about half, versus 15% for Australia and less for countries like Poland where they don't have cane toads, rabbits, crows, dingos, foxes, and crocs to deal with). Despite the impression given by the many drive-by and school shootings, it's actually suicide and not murder that makes up the majority of the United States' 15,000 annual firearms-deaths. One obvious reason for this: not a lot of room for error. Of course, some people still survive the attempt, often by not actually aiming at their brain — even the woman in the page image isn't doing so.

First responders (and all other) really do not like these kinds of suicides. The result is always very messy and gory, and can leave nightmares to anyone who has to witness this kind of suicide happening, or its aftermath.

Someone who wants to give you the chance to do this will Leave Behind a Pistol and no, it doesn't mean edible firearms, or literally eating one - actual edible guns do exist, however!

Sadly, this trope is very much Truth in Television, and it is sufficient to say all Real Life examples are therefore redundant.

A Sub-Trope of Attack the Mouth and Boom, Headshot! (just the attacker is oneself).

As this is a Death Trope, unmarked spoilers abound. Beware.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In Attack on Titan:
  • Early on in the series, a soldier resorts to this after their compound has been surrounded by Titans. Convinced that this is a far less gruesome way to go than being Eaten Alive, he even smiles about having this opportunity.
  • In Chapter 97, Reiner Braun gets ready to pull the trigger, but is interrupted when Falco starts talking outside the room.
• Fullmetal Alchemist:
  • In Fullmetal Alchemist (2003), a seriously traumatised Roy Mustang is crying Tears of Remorse as he gets ready to do this, and has to be stopped by his partner Hughes from going through with it. The reason Roy is suicidal is that he killed Winry Rockbell's parents, Sara and Urey, under orders of the higher-ups.
  • He also tried to commit suicide in the other continuities (manga and Brotherhood), though for different reasons. He is stopped too by Dr. Marcoh.
• In Gankutsuou, Fernard tries to do this after everything has fallen apart on him, but fails. He later succeeds in killing himself, though this time by shooting the side of his head.
• In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind, Polpo is actually tricked into doing this by Giorno to avenge an innocent man's death. He leaves a banana for Polpo to enjoy, which he proceeds to do. Thing is, the banana is actually a pistol that Gold Experience transfigured. As Polpo peels the "banana"...
  Giorno: I took the liberty of changing one of your guns into your favorite snack. It's your last meal, Polpo. Hope you enjoy it.
• Subverted and Played for Laughs in My Bride is a Mermaid. While at the Obon festival, Nagasumi and Sun get chocolate-covered bananas, unaware that the vendor is a member of the yakuza group that Sun's father runs. Sun does get a banana, while Nagasumi gets a chocolate-covered pistol made "just for him." He actually does stick it in his mouth, but realizes what it is and throws it away before anything truly unfortunate happens.
• In Serial Experiments Lain, a guy (using the drug Accela) at the club Cyberia kills himself this way... seemingly because Lain freaked him out somehow.
• In Shiki, Seishirou does this after Natsuno bites and commands him to betray and attack the other Kirishikis. Understandable in that he is fiercely loyal to them, both as one of the family’s heads (second only to Sunako) and Chizuru’s husband. This only happens in the manga. Unfortunately for Yoshie, however, she still manages to get shot by him in both the anime and manga.

Comic Books

• In 52, Ralph Dibny puts a gun in his mouth following the death of his wife only to be interrupted by a phone call informing him his wife's headstone has been defaced.
• This was Joss Whedon's original intent for Merrick in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The film changes it to him getting staked by the vampire Big Bad, but the Origin comic has it.
• Cerebus the Aardvark: In the Form and Void arc, the character Ham Ernestway is a Captain Ersatz of Ernest Hemingway and ends up committing suicide by shotgun just as Hemingway did. This deeply horrifies Cerebus, who was raised to believe that Suicide is Shameful and is thus left reeling by a man who was both a model for old-fashioned manliness and his favorite author taking his own life. At the comic's conclusion, this also factors into the Masculine, Feminine, Androgyne Trio trap set by the YHWH to lure Cerebus away from God after his death. Ham is the "androgyne" part, due to being portrayed as "unmanned" by his suicide, among other things.
• Daredevil: Mysterio killed himself this way in Guardian Devil after finding that Daredevil would not kill him for the death of Karen Page (He also references Kraven's suicide beforehand). He came back but with half of his head missing.
• The F1rst Hero: In the "Wednesday's Child" storyline, when a bunch of Mind Controlled people are ordered to point their guns at their heads, a couple of them are seen sticking their guns in their mouths.
• In The Goon, Buzzard attempts this after being mind screwed by the bad guy. Being an immortal "Reverse-Zombie", he got better.
• In Grendel, Larry Stohler eats his gun when the cops come to arrest him for his crimes as Knowledge Broker for the late Hunter "Grendel" Rose. With a nice big splash page.
• Spider-Man: Sergei Kravinoff committed suicide this way in Kraven's Last Hunt, letting us know that he meant it when he told Spider-Man he (Kravinoff) was giving up the hunt for good.
• Preacher:
  • Arseface got his distinctive looks by trying to kill himself by putting a shotgun under his chin; he was trying to emulate Kurt Cobain's suicide. His father's first words to him in the hospital? "Shoulda put it in your mouth, you dumb little fuck." This was likely a tribute to the infamous Judas Priest incident that launched the witchhunt over Subliminal Seduction.
  • Jesse at one point tells a gun-toting pedophile midget thug to "eat his gun" using his Compelling Voice... and the guy starts chewing on the gunmetal. By the time the cops show up, he was bleeding heavily from his mouth.
  • After Arseface becomes a famous musician, several of his fans try to emulate him by mutilating themselves with shotguns and wind up dead.
• The cover of one of The Punisher issues shows a POV shot of Frank holding a handgun pointed at his own mouth.
• Scooby Apocalypse:
  • Hugo, one of the Four, is revealed to have done this offscreen at some point in response to the monster plague they unleashed.
  • In Issue 30, a post-Despair Event Horizon Daphne almost does this before being interrupted by the monsterfied Fred.
• One of the titular Seven Yakuza, Yoshiro Ebisu, lost everything when the bubble economy burst and he was fired from his finance job. He spent some months pretending to go to work until his wife eventually confronted him; he snapped and pulled a Pater Familicide before turning the gun on himself. The bullet went through his cheekbone and he survived with severe disfigurement (missing most of his jaw on that side and speaking/breathing through a tracheotomy tube). A yakuza associate took pity and paid his hospital bills, hushed up the matter with police, and hired him on to mind his safehouse.
• Sin City:
  • Hartigan does this at the end of That Yellow Bastard after killing the title character, his way of keeping Nancy safe and denying the Roarks their opportunity for revenge.
    Hartigan: An old man dies, a young woman lives. Fair trade.
  • Mort does this in a My God, What Have I Done? moment after he kills Bob over Ava in A Dame to Kill For.
• Transmetropolitan Spider plays with this trope a couple times:
  • After seeing a movie loosely based on his life he sets his bowel disruptor to "fatal intestinal maelstrom" and sticks the end in his mouth. Fortunately the TV was programmed to switch to the porno channel to distract him if he did that. Unfortunately what came up was also based on him.
  • In the last issue he's at his cabin, in the garden, supposedly dying from gradual nerve degeneration from being exposed to info-pollen. He lifts a gun to his mouth... and lights a cigarette with it, it was just a novelty lighter. Then it is hinted that he's starting to recover and keeping it secret to take advantage of everyone's sympathy.
• In Vigilante, Adrian Chase kills himself this way in the last issue.

Fan Works

• Jeong Jeong in Avatar: The Last Airbender Revised, due to a combination of Survivor Guilt and regret for the lives that he and his fellows had ruined during the war.
• Danganronpa: Komm Susser Tod: Shuya's execution ends with the intoxicated victim being handed over a gun, and believing it to be another drink, putting it in their mouth and pulling the trigger.
• In the Supernatural fic Down to Agincourt, Dean, believing himself to be infected with Croatoan, asks Castiel for a Mercy Kill by saying he'd have done it himself but he's out of bullets. One assumes he'd have eaten his gun.
• Eugenesis states that this is what everyone thought would happen to Galvatron, and it's Soundwave's first guess as to what might have happened when he goes missing.
• Fallout: Equestria - Project Horizons: Blackjack attempts this at one point, only to realize that she left the safety on. She turns it off and tries again, but this time one of Watcher's Spritebots spots her and he manages to talk her down.
• Many examples are present in the Mass Effect series, The Council Era, with the most prominent being former krogan overlord Kurvok, following his forced retirement at the hands of his assistant, Halak Marr.
• Mass Effect: Human Revolution: Fist, when caught between C-Sec and Shadow Broker mercenaries. Justified as he really would be in for a worse death had the Shadow Broker caught him.
• In My Hero Academia: Unchained Predator, the Doom Slayer kills Nine by shoving the barrel of Nine's Taurus revolver down his throat and pulling the trigger, making it a rare instance of this trope that doesn't involve self-inflicted harm.
• Played with in The Powerpuff Girls Reimagined, where shortly after their "birth", Buttercup snatches a gun out of The Professor's hand and accidentally shoots herself in the face... but her and her sisters being what they are, this doesn't actually hurt her.
• That's how Gabriel dies in The Seven Misfortunes of Lady Fortune after realizing what he did to his son.
• Craig Brice in "Shock to the System", a Emergency! fic. Sadly, suicide is a too common problem of Real Life first responders.
• This is the method of the title suicide in the creepypasta Squidward's Suicide.
• World of the Dead: Chapter 3 reveals that Saya is debating this, revealing that this is the reason she kept the Luger as a "last resort." Takashi shoots that down, insisting that they haven't come that far to give up now.

Films — Live-Action

• Subverted in Adam's Rib. Adam puts a gun he had trained on his wife and the man who was in love with her in his mouth... and quite literally bites the barrel, revealing that it's made of licorice.
• An American Werewolf in London: One of David and Jack's victims in the porn theater suggests this to David. David naively asks if he "need[s] a silver bullet or something." Jack just rolls his eyes: "Oh, be serious, would you?" It's shown otherwise that ordinary bullets work just fine on werewolves.
• Apparitional: In a flashback, a man is shown sticking a gun in his mouth, and then firing.
• According to him, Dr. Bruce Banner of The Avengers attempted this. "The other guy" spit the bullet out. This references the alternate opening scene from The Incredible Hulk.
• At the end of Bitter Moon, Oscar (who narrated to Nigel about his Destructive Romance) shoots Mimi and then turns the pistol against himself, puts it into his mouth and shoots his brains out. Utterly horrified Fiona and Nigel witness it, but are unable to stop him.
• William H. Macy's character does this in Boogie Nights after murdering his repeatedly-unfaithful wife.
• In Cadillac Man, Tim Robbins threatens to kill himself this way, but Robin Williams talks him out of it.
• The character of Frobisher in Cloud Atlas.
• In Cold Pursuit, Nels Coxman is about to do this when Dante's unexpected presence turns it into an Interrupted Suicide.
• Father's Day (see below) is a Foreign Remake of the 1983 French movie Les Compères. The same scene, played by Pierre Richard, happens there too, although he doesn't keep the gun in his mouth as long.
• The Corruptor: A triad boss, about to be assassinated, choose this method to end his own life when facing his would-be killers. With these as his last words...
  "You want to kill me? You no man enough!" (shoots himself in the mouth)
• In Creepshow one Jordy Verrill enjoys a breakfast of buckshot after a significant portion of his body is consumed by an alien moss.
• The Crying Game. Dil wants to kill Fergus, but her dead lover "won't let her", so instead, she turns the gun on herself. Fergus tenderly removes the gun from her mouth and stops her from committing suicide.
• In C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America, John Ambrose Fauntroy V ends up putting the barrel in his mouth after one his slaves exposes his black ancestry, which would mean his immediate enslavement under the CSA's racial laws. The DNA tests, however, are revealed to be "negative", though we never know what exactly that means.
• Reportedly, David Cronenberg considered having Martin Sheen's character do this in The Dead Zone, but decided that the gun in the mouth was a cliché, and it was more in character for Sheen to put the gun under his chin and shoot upward. He's the kind of character to go out with his chin up.
  • Another version is that Martin Sheen put the gun to his forehead, but their firearms expert pointed out this would only blind him, so it was best to put the gun under the chin because the bullet would blow the top of his head off. Martin did so, then asked, "Are you sure this gun's not loaded?"
• Mr. French in The Departed, had already been shot and then was trapped in his crashed/burning car, with the State Police closing in. "...fuck it."
• Trashy low-budget thriller Devil Angel has a scene where a couple commits suicide together, but with the lady doing all the killing. Firstly blowing out her lover's brains, and then putting the gun into her mouth and pulling the trigger.
• Downfall (2004):
  • The film shows loads of Nazis shooting themselves in the mouth rather than surrender. This is Truth in Television as many of the Nazi leadership, up to and including Hitler himself, chose to go out this way when it became obvious they were doomed to either capture or bloody revenge by the Russians.
  • It draws a hideous contrast between the way the Nazis talk about suicide and the way it really happens. Officers talk thoughtfully about how a bullet through the brain is a clean and dignified end. They nod solemnly as they agree on the proper posture and technique. When someone does it, of course, it is gruesome.
  • The movie also included a scene where Hitler jokingly advises his secretaries on why eating your gun is the correct method for committing suicide (shooting yourself in the side of the head is tricky, as you are likely to miss any vital spots in the brain.)
• Elves (2017): After Chance has given some information to the girls who have come to her for information, the influence of the elf doll takes her over. She sticks her gun in her mouth, and pulls the trigger.
• In Enemy at the Gates, Nikita Khrushchev arrives in Stalingrad to take over the defence of the city. One of the first things he does is talk to his predecessor about his 'failure' to defend the city and how he will answer to "The Boss". He then hands him a gun, and asks him if he'd "prefer to avoid the red tape". The failed commander rather quickly opts for this trope.
• In Eraser James Cromwell's character does this after realizing that the feds have just recorded his confession of treason on video. There's a brief moment when he takes out his gun that the witness thinks he's about to shoot her before he turns the gun on himself.
• Robin Williams's character in Fathers' Day (1997) has the gun in his mouth and is trying to summon the courage to pull the trigger when he gets the call informing him that his son (who he'd been unaware of and isn't really his son) is missing. What follows is a very funny sequence where he holds the conversation, gun still in mouth.
• The protagonist of Fight Club uses a variation of this to get rid of the antagonist. He fires into the back of his jaw area, symbolically "blowing the brains out" of his Split Personality.
• Formerly illustrating this page was Private Pyle in Full Metal Jacket, who kills himself this way with his own rifle after shooting Sgt. Hartman. He had undergone a psychotic breakdown due in large part to Hartman's abusive treatment of him, but also because of the blanket party the others threw for him.
• In A Few Good Men, Matthew Markinson "got into full dress uniform, stood in the middle of that room, drew a nickel-plated pistol from his holster, and fired a bullet into his mouth."
• Ghost Lab (2021): When Dr. Wee and Gla decide one of them should die and haunt the other so that they can continue their research, Dr. Wee takes a handgun he has and sticks it in his mouth. He can't bring himself to pull the trigger, though. So Dr. Gla kills himself instead.
• George Wilson in the film of The Great Gatsby (2013), after killing Gatsby.
• The Great St. Louis Bank Robbery: After the bank robbery goes pear-shaped, Gino tries to escape. Finding there is no way out, and having vowed he was Never Going Back to Prison, he puts his gun his mouth and kills himself.
• The film The Grizzlies is focused on the high rate of suicides in Inuit communities, and the opening scene is of an Inuit boy killing himself with his hunting rifle.
• Hellraiser: Inferno. When Joseph realizes that the loop is restarting again with the murder of the hooker, he puts his sidearm in his mouth and blows his brains out. Subverted as it turns out suicide is not even an option — the loop just resets to its starting point again.
• The Hills Have Eyes (2006): Fred, the man who runs the gas station, blows his head off with a shotgun after he can no longer stomach helping the mutants to lure victims into ambushes.
• In Husk, Brian and Scott find Corey's body in the cellar with his shotgun propped up under his jaw.
• In Infini, an alien bio-agent is forcing a search and rescue crew to attack and kill each other. At one point, Rex is on the verge of killing Menzies, but ultimately sticks the barrel of his own gun in his mouth and blows his brains out to avoid murdering him.
• Intolerable Cruelty. Leave it to The Coen Brothers to make this trope kinda funny.
• Johnny Be Good: Parodied. When Johnny refuses to visit a college in California, Leo threatens to shoot himself in the mouth a toy gun that shoots suction cup darts.
• The Killing Room (2009). Three men are locked in a room for a psychological experiment that quickly turns lethal. It's implied that only one man is to be left standing. At one stage, a gun is thrown into the room with only one bullet, apparently to encourage them to turn on each other. In the end there's only two men left alive, and the man holding the gun decides to shoot himself in a Heroic Suicide. The gun doesn't work and researchers burst into the room and kill his companion, as the experiment is not to find out who's ruthless enough to survive, but who's willing to sacrifice himself for others in order to brainwash people to become suicide bombers.
• The character "Kid" kills himself this way in Land of the Dead after being bitten and infected; in Day of the Dead (1985), another character does the same so he won't have to suffer the pain of being eaten alive.
• In The Last House on the Left Junior blows his brains out, as commanded by Krug.
• Legionnaire ends with the entire Legion of Lost Souls wiped out, save for two characters, Van Damme's and Nicholas Farrell's. The latter, refusing to admit defeat, then blows his brains out via bayonet in a Gory Discretion Shot.
• Martin Riggs in Lethal Weapon (1987) contemplates this form of suicide early on in the movie, but can't follow through. He even has a special hollow-point bullet to make sure his brain is sufficiently damaged. But when he's partnered up with Roger Murtaugh, the latter is so exasperated with Riggs' Death Seeker attitude (which he believes is just a bluff) that he offers him his own revolver to do himself in — and Riggs promptly presses the barrel to the underside of his throat. Then he moves it to his mouth, because the other position still allowed for error, and very nearly fires until Murtaugh realizes he's not bluffing. Riggs pulls the trigger, but Murtaugh realizes at the last minute his intention and grabs the gun, catching the hammer before it fires. Had he not, Riggs would have killed himself.
  Murtaugh: You're not trying to collect a psycho pension. You really are crazy.
  Riggs: I'm hungry. I'm going to go get something to eat.
• Mademoiselle does this at the end of Martyrs, after asking Etienne if he can imagine what the afterlife is like.
• Diane Selwyn in Mulholland Dr. does this after a miniature elderly couple crawl under her door, grow to normal size and chase her as a manifestation of her guilt.
• Nikita. The title character wakes up to find her death was faked and she's now an employee of the Division. Her response is to beat up her captor Bob, steal his revolver and force him to release her, but on being told that Bob can't open the door and no-one else will do so, she puts the gun in her mouth and pulls the trigger. Bob snatches the revolver off her, but not before she has pulled the trigger. Fortunately he keeps the first chamber empty.
• In No Name on the Bullet, the banker Thad Pierce shoots himself out of fear of Gant. He wasn't the target.
• Prisoners: One of the suspects Detective Loki interrogates steals his gun and commits suicide this way.
• In Push Carver "pushes" Mac into doing this. Kira "pushes" Carver into doing the same thing.
  "Put the gun in your mouth. Pull the trigger."
• Halfway through the Stephen King film Riding The Bullet this is revealed to be how Alan Parker's father actually died.
• In one scene in The Road, Viggo Mortensen teaches his son this method, in case he finds himself with no option.
• Tommy Wiseau's The Room (2003) had the main character Johnny take this route when he opts to kill himself on his own birthday, after he found out about his fiancée's affair.
• In Scanners II: The New Order, the police chief is forced to do this to himself by a psychic.
• Shaun in Shaun of the Dead briefly considers this when trapped in the basement with his girlfriend and best friend and outside a few dozen zombies are trying to break in.
• Warden Norton in The Shawshank Redemption does this. As the police arrive to arrest him, he barricades himself in his office, loads his gun, and first appears to be ready to defend himself. He then puts the gun under his chin.
  Red: I like to think that the last thing that went through his head, other than that bullet, was to wonder how the hell Andy Dufresne ever got the best of him.
• Shock To The System, the second Donald Strachey movie, features Donald breaking down as he tells his husband Tim about how his former lover Kyle did this after Kyle and Don were discharged from the Army after their relationship was discovered.
• In Michael Ritchie's Smile, Nicholas Pryor's character, at the end of his rope, has a pistol to his mouth when his wife smirks "Oh, that's right, take the easy way out!" He stops to consider the cause of his condition... and turns the gun on her.
• In Species II, an astronaut blows his brains out with a shotgun once he realizes he is carrying The Virus. Unfortunately, he doesn't get off that easily, and his head simply regrows from the jaw up, with the alien taking full control.
• In one of the final scenes of the German war film Stalingrad, this is how Otto kills himself.
• H in the algorithmically-generated Scifi movie Sunspring does this, although he does not kill himself due to being distracted by a black hole... in the floor.
• In The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) remake, a hitchhiker kills herself this way shortly after joining the group, because she had been kidnapped by the Hewitt family and presumably raped among other things.
• In Titanic (1997), it's mentioned that Caladon Hockley, Rose's asshole fiance played by Billy Zane ended up killing himself this way when the Great Depression drove him into the poor-house.
• Trench 11: A German survivor, under gunpoint, begs the Americans not to tear down the barricade sealing the bunker. When they continue under orders, he shoves the shotgun of the man holding him prisoner into his mouth and the soldier kills him.
• As in the book, so in the various movie adaptations of The Unknown Soldier, Lehto ends up paralyzed by an enemy bullet, and rather than bleeding out slowly, he puts the muzzle of his rifle to his mouth and pulls the trigger. How detailed and gruesome the scene is varies between the adaptations.
• Vampire's Kiss: Peter tries to kill himself this way using Alva's gun. It doesn't work though, as unbeknownst to him it's loaded with blanks. This furthers his belief that he's a vampire, who are traditionally portrayed being Immune to Bullets.
• Vampires vs. Zombies: When the Jeep driver finds Bob's body in the gas station, it looks like she has committed suicide this way. However, later events indicate that it is more likely that the attendant forced the gun into her mouth and pulled the trigger.
• In The Film of the Book of V for Vendetta, one of the men involved in Lark Hill is said to have killed himself in this manner. Finch's exact words are "[He] gave his Beretta a blowjob."
• The Whole Truth (2021): In Phong's final moments, he sticks his gun in his mouth, and then pulls the trigger. Whether it was of his own volition or because Pinya made him do it is up for debate.
• Withnail and I originally ended with Withnail taking a drink out of a shotgun, then doing this to himself.
• After suffering a Villainous BSoD, Big Bad Spyros kills himself this way in The Woman Hunt.
• You Were Never Really Here: Joe has several fantasies and aborted half-attempts at suicide throughout the film. In the very end, he eats his gun at a diner and collapses onto the table in a pool of blood. No one reacts. A few seconds later, it's revealed to be an Imagine Spot.

Literature

• After the Revolution: Super-Soldier Roland does this in the final chapter, using a grenade launcher to make sure the job's done. It fails to kill him, though his brains are so scrambled he loses his memories.
• The Alice Network:
  • James committed suicide by firing a gun into his mouth (“swallowing his gun”) and blowing his brains out.
  • Eve speculated that Cameron might have done the same, but all we know for sure is that he committed suicide with a firearm.
• All You Need Is Kill. Immediately after waking in the past after dying in battle for the fourth time, the protagonist asks for his friend's service pistol, sticks it in his mouth and pulls the trigger just to find out if he really is time-looping.
• In Breakfast of Champions, Dwayne Hoover contemplates doing this, but takes the gun out of his mouth and turns it on his bathroom instead.
• A variant form shows up in Cain's Last Stand. After one character realizes that he can't free himself from Varan's mental control,
  ... he snuggled the muzzle of his laspistol under his chin, and pulled the trigger.
• Carrera's Legions: In A Desert Called Peace, one of the Sumeri soldiers guarding Hill 1647 used his rifle to redecorate the back of his skull, in the continual artillery bombardment of the hill by the Legion.
• Jerome "Romey" Clifford at the beginning of The Client.
• Frobisher in Cloud Atlas, in what might be one of the cruelest Wham Line moments in literary history.
  HÔTEL MEMLING, BRUGES
  QUARTER PAST FOUR IN THE MORNING, 12TH—XII—1931
  Sixsmith,
  Shot myself through the roof of my mouth at five A.M. this morning with VA.’s Luger.
• Discussed in Cryptonomicon: a World War II special forces unit, members of whom know too much to allow themselves to be captured, receives instruction in the correct way to blow your head off with your general issue sidearm. It's the point where one of the characters, who has led a pretty weird life up to that point, realises just how much weirder things are going to get in this new assignment.
  "You would be astonished at how many otherwise competent chaps botch this apparently simple procedure."
• Doom: When Fly and Arlene finally make it to Hell, they find that their lieutenant and corporal also made it, and promptly killed themselves in a suicide pact. Since Fly and Arlene lost their gear going through the portal, they're forced to take the pistols as their only initial means of defense.
• He Who Would Sing at the end of Dreamspeaker.
• As mentioned in Film, the protagonist of Fight Club completes his Glasgow Grin this way.
• In Geek Love by Katherine Dunn, a character attempts this. What the results turn him into get him the nickname "Bag Man".
• In one Hercule Poirot short story, the Victim of the Week is supposed to have done this with a rifle. Poirot quickly realises that, as the victim did not have bare feet allowing him to pull the trigger with his toes, it was Suicide, Not Murder.
• In A Rising Thunder, Honor Harrington book #13, Mind Control Nano Technology used by the Big Bad forces an Admiral to off himself in this manner. It's made to look like suicide and everyone else believes that the Admiral did in fact off himself of his own volition.
• Jaine Austen Mysteries: In Pampered to Death, it's revealed that Mallory Francis had forced an assistant director named Pablo Sandoval to go get mangos for her on one of her shoots during a hurricane, resulting in his crashing his car and being confined to a wheelchair from the injuries, leading to his ultimately committing suicide via this method.
• In I, Jedi it's mentioned that the husband of one of the Big Bads suffered some kind of stroke or fit and was paralyzed. He worked for months at physical therapy until he regained the use of his hands — which one character muses must have been a goal of his, because he immediately performed this trope with a blaster.
• Joe Pickett: Out of Range opens with the game warden of Jackson's Hole eating his gun. Joe is forced to temporarily take over his district and gets caught up in the mystery of why he committed suicide.
• This is how George McIntyre kills himself in the first Red Dwarf novel, because he owes thousands of dollarpounds to the Ganymedian Mafia. His final thought is "I bet this doesn't work." Of course, he knows he's going to be restored as a hologram which doesn't owe the Ganymedian Mafia anything.
• In Needful Things, Brian Rusk commits suicide with his father's rifle under his chin once he realizes the deadly chaos that his quest for a rare baseball card has touched off.
• Billy Starkey, Vic Hammer, and Harold Lauder in The Stand.
• Larry Lipinski in the 5th Stephanie Plum novel dispatches himself this way after shooting his co-worker to death.
• An Implied Trope for a character's mindset in Time Enough for Love: Lazarus Long mentions, repeatedly, that a marriage between a 'Howard' and 'ephemeral' is a bad idea. Then he tells a story about the one time he broke this rule, on a world with a "Wild West" society... and he fell in love with her. When she dies of old age... what was he thinking before he calls his sons into the room?
• In Harry Turtledove's Timeline-191, Hippolito Rodriguez is able to rationalize his work as a death-camp guard for a long time, until a few questions from an elderly inmate he's grown to like force him to realize he is involved in genocide. He performs this trope because he can't live with that knowledge. Turtledove also mentions other guards "eating their guns."
• In To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee, Dolphus Raymond's fiancée does this on their wedding day.
• Cpl. Lehto in The Unknown Soldier, as the night attack goes pear-shaped and he gets hit. Realizing the Soviet bullet left him paralyzed from chest down, he shoots himself with his rifle. Another character later says that Lehto was "the best of them" to suffer that kind of death.
• In We The Living by Ayn Rand, Stepan Timoshenko kills himself in this manner after realizing that the Communist Party he's supported for so long is riddled with corruption.

Live-Action TV

• Plenty of people have eaten firearms in 24. One of them, Charles Logan actually survived it.
• Agatha Raisin: A suspect and blackmail victim does this after Agatha comes nosing around in "Agatha Raisin and the Murderous Marriage".
• Babylon 5: In Endgame Earth Alliance President Morgan Clark realizes that he is about to be arrested and removed from power for having his predecessor murdered and tens of thousands of innocent people killed. Clark decides he doesn't want to hang around to face the consequences and eats his PPG. But not before he turns Earth's defense grid to fire on the planet.
• Battlestar Galactica likes this trope.
  • Boomer attempts it in "Kobol's Last Gleaming". Doesn't quite work because 1.) she's a Cylon sleeper agent and it was against her programming, and 2.) she screwed everything else she ever tried up, so blowing a suicide attempt was just par for the course for her.
  • Brother John Cavil, ostensibly the leader of the (evil) Cylons, does it in response to his last hope of regaining Resurrection going straight down the shitter. To his credit, he managed to turn it into a spiteful "frak you" to everyone still alive on Galactica. And of course there's the possibility that, in the stress of the moment, he simply forgot he didn't have resurrection anymore, and reflexively took his usual way out of a tough spot.
• Brass Eye's Paedogeddon special, which mocked the burgeoning Pædo Hunt mentality in the U.K., had a Parody Commercial for "The Pedo-Files" in which the gun-crazy host announces that "I killed the pedophile in me" by shooting himself this way (and inexplicably survived).
• When one of George W. Bush's speeches was causing major mood swings, Stephen Colbert reacted to one of the bad-news parts by replacing the cigar in his mouth with a gun barrel.
  • On another show, he juggles around his three favorite "American" things — an American flag, a hotdog, and a hand gun — around and eventually ends up holding his hotdog in his gun hand and chewing on the pistol.
  • A third show featured a Formidable Opponent sketch where both of his opposing sides refused to back down. Both of them then pointed guns at the other, which culminated in Blue-tie Colbert sticking Red-tie Colbert's gun in his mouth.
    Colbert: I will See You in Hell! [puts gun in mouth] Go ahead!
  • When he heard of a bill to allow firearms in baseball stadiums, he stated that he hoped he and Sweetness could get on the "kiss cam".
• Ray Fiske does this towards the end of the first season of Damages.
• Danger 5. A Running Gag in "I Danced for Hitler". The French Resistance shoot themselves in depression over the Eiffel Tower being stolen, while a Death Glare from Dr. Goebbels is enough to make his minions blow their brains out whenever one of them stuffs up during Hitler's birthday celebrations.
• Daredevil (2015): After Karen Page thwarts an attempt on her life in her jail cell (at the cost of the attacker's right eye), Wilson Fisk has the attacker himself assassinated and, as Karen learns from Ben Urich a few episodes later, has the scene staged to look like this.
• In Deutschland 83, NATO analyst Henrik Mayer eats his gun after the East German secret service try to blackmail him into spying for them by threatening to reveal his affair with his deceased secretary, who is falsely believed to have been a spy.
• At the end of the sixth season of Engrenages, a corrupt cop who was facing prosecution after being discovered to have been complicit in the murder of his honest partner walks into the police station, gives his colleagues a Motive Rant, then grabs a pistol from one of them and eats it.
• Mentioned in the Firefly episode "The Train Job".
  Sheriff: It's funny, your uncle never mentioning the Bowden's problem... or that Joey Bloggs ate his own gun about eight months back.
  Mal: Did he?
  Sheriff: Yep. Blew the back of his head clean off.
  Mal: So... would his job be open?
• FBI: Most Wanted: In "Decriminalized", a pair of low level marijuana dealers are so scared of their suppliers that when the team corner them in a motel, one of them chooses to eat her gun rather than be arrested.
• For Life: The fate of disgraced prison guard captain Frank Foster.
• Hand of God: This is how PJ shot himself, but survived and was left comatose. Though in fact he'd been coerced to.
• In an episode of The Incredible Hulk, a guy with Napoleon Delusion thought he was Ernest Hemingway, and was acting out scenes from his (Hemingway's) life; his friend didn't see any harm in a little LARPing until Banner pointed out that Hemingway killed himself.
• The IT Crowd had Douglas pull the trigger of a gun while it was in his mouth to check if it was loaded.
• Occasionally turns up in Law & Order. In one notable episode, D.A. Schiff discovers that a judge in a murder case, who was a friend of his, was bought by the defendant's family to avoid conviction. At the end of the episode, Schiff somberly announces that the judge's body has been found with a gunshot to the head. On two other occasions, convicted police officers chose this way out. One in lieu of life in jail for murder and corruption, the other out of guilt for having shot an unarmed youth in a panic, and then planting a gun on the body to try and justify the shooting.
  • Subverted in another episode when Lennie visits an old friend who has spent years plagued with guilt over being forced to turn a blind eye to a perpetrator' s guilt in the murder of a young woman. (The man's family was wealthy and influential.) When Lennie knocks on the door and gets no answer, we are clearly meant to fear this trope until he finds the man in the backyard, gardening. He lampshades this by chiding Lennie for even thinking that he would do such a thing.
• In one episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, Olivia mentions a cop who did this accidentally. According to the story, he was going for his asthma inhaler, but he was sleep-deprived and the reflex to grab his gun got mixed up with the intention to grab his inhaler, and he ended up putting the gun in his mouth and firing it.
  • At one point, Munch mentions to Fin that one of his early partners died this way while he was serving in the Baltimore police department.
• In The Lost Room, the Occupant manages to grab the protagonist's gun and immediately shoots himself in the mouth. However, because he's an indestructible Object, the bullet bounces off his palate.
• Kirby does this at the end of the Masters of Horror episode "Cigarette Burns" under the effects of an Artifact of Death, while looking at a hallucination of his dead girlfriend.
• Big Chubby in My Name Is Earl would often scare people with a gun, which turned out to be a squirt-gun filled with vodka. One night, he wanted to squirt a shot of vodka in his mouth, but mixed up his guns.
• One of Gibbs' flashbacks in the NCIS episode "Hiatus" shows him sitting on the beach where he shared happy times with his late wife and daughter with a gun pointed at his face, clearly contemplating doing this following their tragic deaths.
• Oz: When a white inmate is being bullied by a trio of black inmates, another prisoner sneaks him a pistol. When he's picked on again, he shoots two of the inmates, another random inmate, and a Corrections Officer. When the SORT team, armed with guns and riot shields, corner the inmate, he realizes his chances and deep throats his handgun.
• Brad Bellick is about to do this in Prison Break after getting fired from Fox River Penitentiary due to the titular event. He locks himself in his room and is about to eat the gun, when his mother mentions that a large reward has been announced for the escapees. He changes his mind.
• A minor character in Reno 911! threatens to do this, almost by name.
  "Did you ever hear the story of 'Reading Ron eats a gun'?!"
• Sherlock:
  • In The Hounds of Baskerville, Sherlock's client attempted to do this - though he was saved by the main characters.
  • Jim Moriarty appears to have killed himself this way at the end of The Reichenbach Fall, though many fans believe otherwise.
  • This is how Emelia Ricoletti commits suicide in Sherlock Special "The Abominable Bride".
• The Shield: Shane did this as part of the Humiliation Conga Vic Mackey was suffering.
• Anthony Finelli, Gabe's 7-year old brother, does this by accident offscreen on Six Feet Under, killing himself instantly and leaving his body for Gabe and his friend (who were smoking pot at the time) to find in his mother's room.
• Star Trek;
  • In the Star Trek: Enterprise episode "Terra Prime" the xenophobic organization's Enterprise mole Ensign Masaro shoots himself after he is uncovered as the person who sabotaged a shuttlepod carrying a team to rescue Tucker and T'Pol from Terra Prime custody crashes some distance from the base.
  • Star Trek: Picard:
    • F8 terminates himself with a laser welder.
    • One of the Zhat Vash shoots herself with a disruptor after experiencing the Admonition.
    • Rios' former captain, Alonzo Vandermeer, blew his own brains out after carrying out Starfleet's orders to assassinate two people.
• Derek met Jesse when she saved him from killing himself this way in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
• Supernatural: Played for Black Comedy in "Wishful Thinking". A depressed teddy bear, brought to life by a careless wish, puts a shotgun in his mouth... resulting in nothing but a harmless spray of stuffing and a Big "WHY?!"
• Vera: The Victim of the Week in "Sandancers" is murdered in such a way as to make it look like he ate his gun. Later, another soldier actually commits suicide this way which muddies the waters of the investigation.

Music

• The phrase is actually mentioned in the last verse of the Blue Öyster Cult song, "Monsters". Poor Joe.
• "Albert Goes West", by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, is about various characters traveling to across America. One of them "ended up in a bungalow sucking a revolver".
  • Off the same album, "We Call Upon the Author" has a line about the poet John Berryman, who "went the Heming way". Both Berryman and Hemingway died of this trope.
• Implied in "THE FINAL" by Dir en grey in its original PV, where the protagonist, upon finding his family murdered, is implied to commit suicide in this manner.
• Filter's "Hey Man Nice Shot", about the Real Life on-camera suicide of politician R. Budd Dwyer.
• The end of the music video to Disturbed's "Inside the Fire" has the subject (the lead singer) do this with a rifle.
• Firewater's "Hold On, Slow John" includes the line:
  You'll never get used to the taste of a gun.
• The Lonely Island's "Like a Boss"'s protagonist comes close.
  Buy a gun! (Like a boss)
  In my mouth! (Like a boss)
  Aww fuck man, I can't fucking do it, shit!
  Pussy out! (Like a boss)
• Ludo's Save Our City has the mayor do this in desperation when the last vestige of humanity (his to protect) is almost certainly going to fall to the zombies:
  "With a flash like the sun, his lips are unwrapped from the barrel of his gun..."
• Mentioned in Nine Inch Nails' "1,000,000":
  Put the gun
  In my mouth
  Close your eyes
  Blow my fucking brains out
  Pretty patterns
  On the floor
• Happens in the video for Pearl Jam's "Jeremy", when the main character comes into his classroom with a gun and shoots himself in the mouth in front of his bully classmates. Eddie Vedder and Jeff Ament wrote the song... partially inspired by the story of a kid who DID kill himself like this.
• Ultrasound by Johnny Massacre mentions this and a real life example:
  G is for glory
  Cuz my fate will be gory
  If I do a Kurt Cobain to leave behind my story

Comedy

• On his posthumously released final album, Rant In E Minor, Bill Hicks does a bit about Jay Leno killing himself this way on The Tonight Show after a particularly soul-crushing interview with Joey Laurence.
• John Pinette tried going gluten-free once....
  John: I went to a health food store, which was a new experience for me, and now I like shopping at health food stores, and if you wanna know where the gluten-free stuff is, look for a gentleman with a gun in his mouth. 'Cause bullets are gluten-free!
• Australian comedy trio Tripod. Yon does this during their one performances in 'Live At Woodford', using his hand as a gun. Some random mook starts yelling, "Do it!"

Theater

• Charlie attempts this at the end of 25 Saints, only to find that his gun is empty, so he sets himself on fire instead.
• In The Complete History Of America Abridged, one of a group of soldiers trapped in the trenches of World War I has to be restrained from doing this with his water gun.
• Hedda Gabler shoots herself this way (as opposed to a shot in the temple) in some productions.
• 'night, Mother opens with Jessie telling her mother of her plans to do this, and the rest of the play follows her mother trying to convince her not to. At the end of the play, Jessie locks herself in her bedroom and goes through with the plan.
• Moritz in Spring Awakening does this; it is known amongst fans to be the point in the show when regular audience members who have no knowledge of the plot gasp as Moritz does this rather abruptly after his infamous "So dark..." speech. It then fades into his funeral, with the equally sob-worthy "Left Behind".
• In A Streetcar Named Desire, this was how Blanche's husband killed himself after she confronted him over his homosexuality.

Video Games

• In BioShock Infinite, human enemies you hit with the Possession Vigor will do this once it wears off. It's not clear whether this is one of the Vigor's effects or if they just can't live with themselves after being forced to fight on the same side as their religion's Antichrist (a.k.a. you).
• Cry of Fear allows Simon to acquire a shotgun from the corpse of someone who did this with it, the shotgun in their hands and most of their head splattered against the back wall. One enemy type attacks at range by psychically attempting to force Simon to do this to himself. Also, all bad variations of the ending start off with Simon doing this to himself.
• Jackie Estacado does this to himself in The Darkness after seeing Jenny get killed by his uncle. But the Darkness isn't letting him off the hook that easily.
• In the opening of Digital Devil Saga 2, Serph finds a petrified man holding a handgun directly at his mouth, in an attempt to killing himself before he turned into stone by the Black Sun's corrupted rays. Fortunately for Serph, he uses the victim's handgun to defend himself from a squad of Karma Society soldiers who surrounded him while he was looking at the statue.
• In Disco Elysium failing a certain Authority check will cause the Player Character to put a loaded gun in his mouth in front of the Good Ol' Boys, just to prove a point. It is up to the player whether they want to pull the trigger to really hammer the point home.
• One of the audio logs in Doom³ recounts an incident where a UAC marine, suffering from the Sanity Slippage affecting many of the UAC personnel on Mars, does this with a plasma gun. There was no head left, just vapor.
• Doom Eternal has the Doom Slayer force Mecha-Zombies to do this as part of a glory kill. Grab its Arm Cannon, shove the business end into the monster's mouth, and watch its dawning realization that of all the horrible ways the Doom Slayer could send it back to hell, this is the fastest and least painful. The Mecha-Zombie fires the cannon, and its head is replaced by a shower of brain matter and vaporized blood.
• The first Endless Nightmare ends with your character, driven insane by the death of your wife and daughter, finding your Glock and deciding to blow your brains out from the mouth, with you pointing the weapon at yourself from a first-person POV. Then the screen goes black.
• Eternal Evil have one of the Cross Hotel's survivors who tells you his intentions to kill himself after witnessing the rest of the hotel's occupants turning into monsters, despite your efforts to talk him out. Said survivor had a loaded gun, and as you leave him, you hear a gunshot from behind the door... if you backtrack into the room, you see him dead face-down with a bloody hole on his nape.
• Fallout 4 has you getting several of your guns off skeletons that turned their weapons on themselves when the bombs fell.
• A possible resolution of the Fallout: New Vegas sidequest "Return to Sender". You discover that Chief Hanlon has been sabotaging NCR communications by doing things such as forging bogus field reports like Great Khans using trained Deathclaws in battle, sending shitloads of ammo to a Ranger station that desperately needs a restock on their drinking water, sending shitloads of medical supplies to a Ranger station that desperately needs more ammo, and more. Confront him and he gives his Motive Rant: He feels that the war with Caesar's Legion is never going to end, and he's trying to frustrate the NCR enough so that they pack up and leave before too many more soldiers get killed. If you decide to turn him in, he locks himself in his office and gives a heartbreaking speech over the intercom before putting a bullet in his head. Then you can go in and nab that nice Ranger Sequoia he used used to do the deed.
• Far Cry 2 gives you the option to do this to your wounded mercenary buddies if you've run out of morphine or they're too grievously injured to be saved. Can't bear to watch? That's okay - neither can the protagonist.
• In Final Fantasy XIV's Endwalker expansion, this is the gruesome fate of Legatus Quintus van Cinna, leader of the Ist Legion. Wounded in the Enemy Civil War against the IIIrd Legion, he's still determined to see Garlemald reclaimed from the Telophroi and refuses to accept "charity" from the Eorzean Alliance, instead hoping to gain help from other Legions like the Xth. When one of his soldiers, Jullus, is able to secure some ceruleum with some help from a captive Warrior of Light, Alphinaud and Alisaie, Quintus decides to use the precious resource to fuel what warmachina that can to force the Alliance out of Garlemald and leave their supplies. However, when he finds out the Xth have already been defeated and what's left has come to the Eorzean Alliance for aid, he falls so despondent that he releases his Legion from their duty, then shoots himself in the head.
• In Gears of War 2, you get Tai Kaliso as an early squadmate, who is shown to be a Made of Iron badass that can shrug off being inside a vehicle as it explodes like it's no big deal. Later, he stays behind to hold off some Locust while Marcus and Dom escape. Surely he'll be fine, right? Later still, you clear out a Locust barge and discover that he's being held prisoner on it, so Marcus lets him out, hands him a gun, and tells him to get back to ass-kicking. Turns out that after being extensively tortured by the Locust, he's not really in the mood for ass-kicking. Or living. *BANG*.
  • Meanwhile, in the Expanded Universe, General Bardry Salaman did this since he was unable to live with himself after helping to carry out the Hammer of Dawn attack that killed much of the human population in a desperate attempt to stop the Locust. Except not really, that was just the cover story that was given for his relocation to Azura.
• There's a corpse in an armchair in Half-Life 2 Episode 2, with a shotgun on the ground and a large splat on the wall. Your Vortigaunt partner even comments on it.
  • Also seen in the original Half-Life 2: if you hop the broken fence across the street from the gas station in Highway 17, there's a corpse close to a large splotch of blood, and a .357 revolver on the ground not too far from it. Though this raises the question of why the revolver has all six chambers loaded when you pick it up.
• In several of the Halo games, if the Master Chief dies, one of the Marines can occasionally be overheard saying something similar to "The Chief is dead? I...think I'll go eat my gun now."
• In Hitman 3, Lucas Grey commits a Heroic Suicide version. In order to preserve Agent 47’s cover, he steals a gun, puts it under his chin, and pulls the trigger.
• Instinct have a scientist who's a Zombie Infectee choosing to kill himself in this manner to escape zombification, though it's a Gory Discretion Shot where the screen cuts the moment he puts his gun into his mouth.
• Isle of the Dead has a Press X to Die choice if you chose to quit, where your character then puts his rifle into his mouth. [[Followed by this screenshot]].
• One boss fight in Killer7 ends with the boss, crippled by falling debris, sticking his gun in his mouth and committing suicide. The end boss of the same chapter does a variant: she sticks a grenade in her mouth and pulls the pin.
• In The Last of Us Part II, while Ellie and Dina are exploring the ruins of Downtown Seattle, one of the places they can explore is a bank where a group of bank robbers tried to hit it during Outbreak Day, only for most of them to have been turned into infected, the longest one having become a clicker. Getting inside the vault you find that one of the bank robbers blew his brains out with his own shotgun after seeing he was bit, then realizing he was turning.
  "OH SHIT! IS THIS HOW IT HAPPENS? AM I TURNING INTO ONE OF THEM???"
  "FUCK THAT! IF I'M GOING OUT... I'LL GO OUT LIKE A FUCKING MAN!"
• Loopmancer have more than one alternate ending where you kill yourself via revolver into the mouth, from a first-person perspective. Your death isn't permanent, though - you're stuck in a "Groundhog Day" Loop and can reset it only by death.
• The Renegade ending to Jacob's loyalty quest in Mass Effect 2 has Shepard and Jacob leaving behind a half-charged pistol for Jacob's father Ronald as the people he abused and forced to eat toxic food close in on him intent on revenge, with the intention of making him do this to spare himself from what they will do to him.
• Solid Snake does this if you wait too long at the title screen of Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. Why he would do it takes the whole game to explain. He ultimately chickens out much to his own disbelief. Good thing too because he learned just a few minutes later that he wasn't about to become a walking bio-weapon, and thus didn't have to kill himself.
• If you're on the brink of turning in No More Room In Hell, this is how you can save your teammates the trouble of putting your zombified self down. All background noise fades out as you point the gun at yourself, replaced by the sound of your heartbeat until you pull the trigger.
• In the original Postal, you can do this by pressing the "suicide" button, which causes the Postal Dude to shoot himself in the head with the Machine Gun. In Redux, this is expanded to multiple weapons aside from the machine gun to kill himself unlike the original game.
  • As Copy Protection in the first game, the Postal Dude will repeatedly kill himself when a level starts. Unless if the "suicide" feature is removed by modding the game.
• In Resident Evil 3: Nemesis, you find the memo of a doomed police officer, David, who did or intended to do this:
  When I finish this bottle, my old friend, Mossberg (a brand of shotgun), will be turning one last body into fertilizer.
• The Serial Experiments Lain Playstation game ends (rather unlike the anime) with Lain committing suicide this way.
• In Shadow Warrior (1997), if the basic mooks spend long enough shooting at the player character to no effect, they'll feel so dishonored by their failure they'll put the barrel of their Uzi in their mouth and blow half their skull off.
• In Spec Ops: The Line, Konrad did this shortly after the introductory cutscene. After discovering this, Walker can follow suit.
• In System Shock 2, someone ended his life that way with the shotgun, considering the position of the gun on the body.
• Agent Stone of Twisted Metal: Black tries to do this during his backstory, but the gun is empty.
• The E3 announcement trailer for ZombiU has a nameless British office worker preparing to do this (around the 1:10 mark) when it becomes quite clear that no amount of pills or injections will stem the tide of his infection. After a glass of liquor and a sad look at a photo of his wife and child, we see that in spite of his expression, he has already pulled the trigger because of the incoming horde of zombies mere feet from where he sits. The next tableau on the bridge shows that it really didn't work — he became a zombie himself.

Web Animation

• ASDF Movie: The tenth installment features a crying fat man who looks like he's about to do this but then proceeds to literally eat the gun.
• Cyriak Harris' Sugar Zombie Apocalypse video MEOW features a desperate and cornered cat-general that does this to escape the incoming horde of cute cat-zombies converging on him (that had previously been shown bloodily mauling his troops to death). It doesn't work. In spite of not being infected by a zombie and the ruined brain that would normally stop zombies, his lifeless corpse rises to join the zombie horde, like all the dead soon do.

Webcomics

• Played for Laughs in Awkward Zombie, where Snake finds this option preferable to hearing Otacon drone on about Pokémon.
• In Exterminatus Now, Eastwood attempts suicide this way when cornered by a black widow demon who promises to rape and kill him. Unfortunately, he just emptied it trying to shoot out a lock.
• This is how № 4 from Hell(p) ended up in Hell. We get to see it as a part of his backstory shown in the first anniversary bonus comic. This is also the source of his Wound That Will Not Heal: a hole in the back of the head.
• Snake does exactly the same thing in Hiimdaisy's Let's Destroy Metal Gear Again! when Raiden proudly announces that he was basically trained by video games. Maybe he just likes the taste of cordite?
• In Neon Ice Cream Headache, Jose almost does this as he thinks he's going to be trapped inside a crappy Western show forever, but reconsiders as he spots a TV that will let him return to the real world.
• Alluded to in one Penny Arcade strip: Gabe and Tycho come home after buying a fictional Nirvana edition of Rock Band and are horrified when they find that the box contains a shotgun-shaped controller.
• Subverted in this Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic, where a man turns out to be literally eating a gun. And it's not the first. .
• In Wapsi Square, Jin attempts to do this with a flintlock pistol after she regained her mortality. She was stopped just in time.
• In VG Cats, the evil storekeeper Johnny Evil Guy eats his gun after Ternaldo had spent several hours harassing him and his customers about anime. What drives him over the edge is a lame pun about "flipping" out over the Yu-Gi-Oh! movie.

Web Original

• The SCP Foundation has SCP-2076 ("Shooting Yourself Can Increase Your Bullet Resistance"), a phenomenon where posters appear across Illinois, appearing to be some publicity campaign preaching Meaningless Meaningful Words or just Blatant Lies that readers take at face value.

Web Videos

• Epic Rap Battles of History:
  • It features this in one behind-the-scenes video when Princess Peach won't shut up. Unfortunately for Mario, the gun is empty.
  • In their third battle, Darth Vader ridicules Adolf Hitler for having done this when the Red Army were beating down the doors of the Fuhrerbunker in the final days of World War II.
• Jack tries to do this in one scene in The Horribly Slow Murderer with the Extremely Inefficient Weapon. The Ginosaji knocks the gun out of his mouth. The Ginosaji won't let Jack get away that easily.
• The Contingency PSA produced by ＬＯＣＡＬ５８ encourages all Americans to do this as the 'ideal' method of mass suicide. It even gives instructions!
• The Nostalgia Critic gets close to doing this when the "Fast-Talking Supernatural Dick Club" won't shut up, but they cut out before he can make his brain hit the wall.
• Todd in the Shadows attempted this in his review of "Imma Be" due to its repetitiveness. The gun turns out to be fake.

Western Animation

• Done twice by Master Shake from Aqua Teen Hunger Force using a shotgun; first to get out of serving in the Navy, only for him to later be poorly reassembled; then after he joined a group of teenage Juggalos and grew irritated with them.
• This seems to be the preferred method by Drawn Together when it comes to suicide by firearms (normally as Suicide as Comedy, considering the show's Crosses the Line Twice nature).
• Family Guy:
  • Stewie Griffin almost does this when Peter won't stop singing "Surfin' Bird". He sticks the gun in his mouth, and it cuts to commercial. He's fine in the next scene.
  • Parodied in one episode where the guys are playing laser tag, and Peter is weirdly good at it. When asked how he does it, he answers that it's not about what he does but how he forgives himself for doing it, then puts the laser gun in his mouth and fires, though obviously, all it does is light up the inside of his mouth.
  • Peter once shot himself this way, but it turned out to be one of his Scrubs fantasy moments. This led to a Take That! of such moments.
  • At a tour of a fire station, one fireman says that they originally had to literally fight fires by wrestling them as humanoid shapes. He wrestles one such fire into submission, only for it to get back up, kill him with a shotgun, and then turn it on itself this way.
• In King of the Hill, Cotton prepares to do this, dressing up in full military uniform with all of his medals, and asking Dale to lend him a single bullet. He is interrupted at the last moment by his wife Didi barging in and telling him to watch their infant son Good Hank for a while since she's been with him all day. Hank gets there just in time to hear the gunshot from outside the door and bursts in to find that Cotton had opted to have GH fire the bullet into a mattress instead, apparently having found some renewed will to live (Babies Make Everything Better?).
• Looney Tunes:
  • Inversion: in "My Little Duckaroo", Canasta is playing poker with Daffy Duck. Daffy has 51 cards to Canasta's one, and when Daffy calls, Canasta rams his gun in Daffy's mouth ("I got a three o' clubs." Daffy: "Beats me!").
  • Similarly, in the director's cut of 1943's "Hare Ribbin'", after the dog wishes he were dead, Bugs Bunny shoves a gun in the dog's mouth and fires.
• The president in season 2 and the dentist in season 3 of Metalocalypse.
• Rick and Morty references this obliquely. Jerry tells Beth that he wishes her shotgun were his penis. She says that if it were, he could call her Ernest Hemingway, referencing Hemingway's suicide method to make a blowjob joke. Jerry doesn't get it.
• South Park:
  • Parodied when Cartman, thinking he's lost his sense of humor, appears to be writing a suicide note and puts the barrel of a gun in his mouth, then takes a bite out of it and adds a P.S. to his mom to buy more chocolate guns (marshmallow, not peanut butter).
  • In "Stupid Spoiled Whore Video Playset", Paris Hilton's pet dog kills itself this way.
  • Even the Queen of England does it after the British invasion fleet gets destroyed in "The Snuke".
  • Played for laughs in "Night of the Living Homeless" when a scientist shoots himself in the face to prevent from being attacked and joined by the homeless. No matter how many times he shoots himself, he just doesn't die.
  • Another example is in "Le Petit Tourette"; this was after an ambushee on Chris Hansen's Dateline segment "To Catch a Predator" committed suicide this way, and at the end of the episode, perverts keep showing up at a taping of his new special, then killing themselves this way when they find out it's him.
  • Britney Spears in "Britney's New Look". Not that it had any effect on her mental abilities.
  • Butters is told to do this by a meme-hating teacher in "Faith Hilling". He ends up frozen in his seat with the gun in his mouth for nearly the entire episode's length.

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