Distract and Disarm

Seymour Talbot: You know, I learned a thing or two after the last time you kicked [my bodyguard "Jackass"'s] ass.... When it comes to my personal security, I gotta take care of things myself. [dramatic gun cock]
Michael Westen: You got hollow points in there.
Seymour: [looks at the gun] Oh, you can tell just by looking—
Michael: [grabs the gun out of his hand] No, I can't, but I can distract you long enough to take it.

— Burn Notice, "Seek and Destroy"

Being held at gunpoint is not a great situation to be in: the other guy can kill you before you can draw your own weapon.

But not if you distract them long enough to grab the weapon out of their hand and subdue them, reversing your positions. Maybe lie to them that the safety is on or that It Works Better with Bullets, tell them to Look Behind You, or briefly Show Some Leg. Regardless, the point is to get them to take their eyes off you so you get a brief opening to try to disarm them.

This is possible in real life, and taught in some self-defense courses, but it is very dangerous to attempt: if the gunman is not successfully distracted, they can usually shoot you faster than you can disarm them.

A gun is not necessarily required for this maneuver, but it's more common than doing it against a knife wielder.

Subtrope of We Need a Distraction. Compare Defensive Failure, where the gunman doesn't have the nerve to fire and the other character simply takes it, Disarm, Disassemble, Destroy, where the character formerly held at gunpoint then disables the weapon altogether, and You Wouldn't Shoot Me, where the defending character tries to call the gunman's bluff. If the attempted disarm doesn't get the gun away immediately, it can lead into a Gun Struggle.

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Examples:

Comic Books

• Played for laughs in G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero (Marvel). Snake Eyes' old master, pretending to be a simple chef, deals with an attempted robbery by a young teenager. First he points out that the safety is on in the boy's gun, and when the boy takes it off, he grabs the gun's slide, pops out the bullet from the chamber, drops the clip off, and then offers to buy the empty gun from him for $100, dropping it in a crate full of empty pistols!

Films — Animation

• In Treasure Planet: Delbert pulls this off, and he does it with an amazing line.
  Delbert: Yes, I'm sure you will! But before you do, I have one more question! (Holds up the pirate's gun) Is this yours?

Films — Live-Action

• Babylon 5: A Call To Arms: When Drake reveals himself as the mole, Garibaldi directly approaches him, asking questions about why he was betrayed. A ranger to the side extends his pole weapon, serving as enough of a distraction for Garibaldi to grab the gun and interrogate Drake.
• Lone Star State of Mind: Early in the movie, the protagonists watch a Film Within a Film in which the hero distracts someone who has him at gunpoint by tossing a lighter into the air and then disarming him. Later on, Earl successfully replicates the stunt by distracting a Cartel goon with a lighter and in the third act of the film Junior tries the stunt himself but he's so dumb that he spends the moment the goon is distracted patting himself in the back for his cleverness instead of disarming the guy and gets punched in the face as a result.
• RoboCop: When Murphy and Lois go into the old steel mill, Lois finds Joe Cox (one of Clarence Boddicker's thugs) peeing in a corner. When she tells him to put his hands up and turn around, he does. As she holds him at gunpoint, she tells him he's under arrest, and he asks if he can "zip it up," and glances down. When she also glances towards his groin region, Joe slaps the gun out of her hand, and pushes her off the balcony they're standing on. As she lies stunned on some rubbish, Joe laughs and zips up his pants.
• The Rock: Following a massacre of the SEAL team that leaves only elderly convict John Mason and meek FBI specialist Stanley Goodspeed alive, Mason decides Screw This, I'm Outta Here and attempts to leave Alcatraz Island. Goodspeed pulls his sidearm on Mason and orders him to stop; Mason first intimidates him, then remarks "Besides, the safety's on." Half a second after Goodspeed looks down he finds his own gun pointed at his face.
• Star Wars, Return of the Jedi: In a close variant, an Imperial scout trooper has Leia at gunpoint. Wicket the Ewok sneaks up and smacks the trooper's leg with his spear. The trooper goes "What the—" and looks down, and Leia grabs a handy branch and brains the trooper with it, then grabs her gun back from him and kills his partner before he can escape.
• Who Framed Roger Rabbit: Eddie Valiant goes to R.K. Maroon's office, claiming to have Marvin Acme's will, as a ploy to get him to confess to his part in Acme's murder. Maroon pulls a gun on him, demanding to see the will. Eddie gives him Roger's love letter to Jessica (ironically written on the will itself, which was in invisible ink), distracting him enough for Eddie to douse him with a nearby seltzer bottle, then punch him out and take the gun.

Literature

• And Then There Were None: When Vera Claythorne and Phillip Lombard find Dr. Armstrong's body washed up on shore they believe they are the only ones left on the island, so each thinks the other must be the murderer. Lombard has a gun, but Claythorne convinces him that they need to move Dr. Armstrong's body so it won't be washed away again at high tide. While "helping" Lombard to move the body she picks his pocket and eventually shoots him.
• Rebuild World: The Mole Selba in Sheryl's gang takes Sheryl hostage and demands that Akira Put Down Your Gun and Step Away. Akira banks on the fact that Selba is an amateur, as well as that Selba is The Resenter and clearly wants to murder him, to do as he asks, use his Gun Fu skills to Dodge the Bullet, then disarm Selba while he's surprised.
• In The Stand, Stu disarms the guard sent to kill him by yelling that there's a rat off to the side. When the guy turns to look, Stu clobbers him with a chair. It stuns him long enough for Stu to struggle with him and eventually get the gun away before the guy can use it.
• Tales from the Mos Eisley Cantina: Momaw Nadon lures an Imperial captain into an alley and threatens to kill him. The captain laughs ruthlessly and says, "You can't kill me with a blaster set to stun." Momaw knows he set the blaster to Kill, but fears he may have knocked the setting aside, and looks. Of course, it is set on Kill, but he has lost his chance, and the captain shoots him. (Luckily, his blaster is set on Stun.)

Live-Action TV

• Parodied in the Black Mirror episode "USS Callister": Daly and his crew are held at gunpoint by Valdack. Daly distracts Valdack by saying "Look! A naked lady!" which... works (Valdack asks "where?"), and enables him to attack back and disarm Valdack, who begs for death. In fact, this is because Valdack is another captive clone and he is neither capable of nor interested in hurting anybody. The absurdity of the premise is to show Daly's petty control of the clones and his obsession with remaking tropes from Space Fleet.
• Burn Notice:
  • "Pilot": Michael tells a man pointing a gun at him, "By the way, Vince, you're gonna have a hard time blowing my brains out with the safety on." When Vince looks at the gun to check, Michael wrestles the gun away from him, firing off a shot in the process of getting it out of his hands: "What do you know, the safety was off! My mistake."
  • "Seek and Destroy": One of Michael's contacts, an Arms Dealer named Seymour, pulls a gun on him when he and Fiona gatecrash a party he's throwing to talk to him (after they curbstomp his bodyguard). Michael comments he has hollow points loaded, which causes the hapless Seymour to take the gun off him to try to figure out how Mike could tell. Michael immediately snatches the gun and puts Seymour in a headlock.
• In the premiere of Farscape, John Crichton's father gives him a puzzle ring as a good luck charm before his mission. Later he's searched by Peacekeeper troopers who find the ring. John is able to coax one of them into trying the puzzle; the other trooper becomes convinced it's some kind of trap and tries to wrest it off him, whereupon John snatches a pulse pistol and uses it to make his escape. As John says to his father when they meet again, the ring might not have given him luck, but it did save his ass.
• The Punisher (2017): In Season Two, Frank Castle’s Teen Sidekick Amy, whom he taught how to disarm gunmen, takes advantage when a thug holding her hostage is looking away towards the stairwell Frank is approaching from, to disarm him and shoot him with his own gun.
• Scorpion: In "Going South", Happy is held at gunpoint by a kidnapper. She tells him his gun has no firing pin. When he turns the gun away from her to check, she jumps him.
• Xena: Warrior Princess: In an early episode, Gabrielle finds herself holding a hostile warlord at swordpoint. He retaliates by mocking her, telling her that she has no business pretending to be a warrior, and that she isn't even holding her sword properly. Sure enough, Gabrielle takes her eyes off the warlord for a moment to check her grip, and he knocks the sword out of her hands.

Video Games

• Mass Effect 2: In a close variant, at the climax of Thane's loyalty mission, his son Kolyat takes a local politician he was contracted to assassinate hostage at gunpoint. A Paragon interrupt lets Shepard shoot a lamp behind Kolyat to distract him, then rush and disarm him.
• Star Wars: The Old Republic: When the Bounty Hunter PC catches up with Torian Cadera on Taris, he ambushes them, surprising them with a blaster pistol held to the back of the head. An option for the female PC is to turn around and flirtatiously remark that she just couldn't stay away from him after their previous meeting, which confuses the inexperienced-with-women Torian long enough for her to grab his arm, knock the gun away, and judo-flip him over her shoulder. (Male PCs who pick the corresponding conversation choice simply do the judo throw without distracting him first.)
  Female Bounty Hunter: (holding him down with a boot) Men... Time to tell me what you're doing out here.
  Torian: Ow... I deserved that.
  Gault Rennow: You must like him. If I tried that, I'd be wearing my face on the back wall.

Visual Novels

• Virtue's Last Reward: In Sigma's ending, Dio threatens to explode the facility where the cast is being held captive, when Tenmyouji steps forward and tells the villain that the detonator is actually a fake. This causes Dio to absent-mindedly look at the device, at which point the old man tackles him and successfully wrestles the detonator out of his hand.

Web Comics

• Double Subverted in Leftover Soup #943. Jamie is held at gunpoint by Roscoe Knight, who thinks Jamie killed his son Richard. Jamie recognizes the gun from earlier and asks Roscoe if he got a new firing pin for it, then grabs it out of his hands when he's distracted. Lucky the first thing he did was yank the slide back while the gun was still in Roscoe's hand, because the next page reveals the gun did receive a new firing pin.
  Jamie: Wow, I am not as fast as I thought I was. You pulled that trigger, like, three times.
  Roscoe: What the hell's the matter with you?

Real Life

• Gun disarms are taught in some self-defense courses. This article describes the person playing the victim being mugged and reaching for his wallet, then disarming the mugger with the other hand and subduing him while the mugger is distracted watching the wallet hand.

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