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Basic Trope: A single bullet pierces through and kills multiple people at once.

  • Straight: Alice fires her gun and manages to kill Bob, Charlie and Diana with a single bullet.
  • Exaggerated: Alice's gun bullet foregoes the laws of physics and zooms across the world, stabbing through and executing swiftly hundreds of people on its trajectory.
  • Downplayed:
    • Alice's shot kills Bob, goes through him and wounds Charlie.
    • Alice's shot pierces through Bob, Charlie and Diana, but fails to kill any of them.
  • Justified:
    • Alice's weapon is actually modified to be able to pull off this kind of stunt, by having the bullets suffer from the effects of friction as little as possible, even against solid objects like human bodies.
    • More Truth in Television than people might think - this is why one of the rules of gun safety involves always checking what's behind the target, as it is mandatory to always assume the bullet will penetrate the target and retain lethal velocity.
  • Inverted: Bob, Charlie and Diana all shoot at Alice together.
  • Parodied: The bullet never stops ricocheting whatsoever and never loses velocity, starting an uncontrollable rampage around the scenery and killing everyone in its path.
  • Subverted: Alice fires her gun at Bob while he's standing in front of Charlie and Diana. Bob is killed, but Charlie and Diana appear unaffected.
  • Double Subverted: Then Charlie appears with a bullet wound in his chest and drops dead several seconds later.
  • Zig-Zagged: ...Or so it seems, but Charlie is still alive and slowly comes to a minute later. Then Diana collapses against the floor as well, but she's left in a comatose state, in the brink of life and death.
  • Averted:
  • Lampshaded: "...Well, you know what they say: 'Two birds with one stone'... Or one bullet, here."
  • Invoked: Alice crafts her weapon carefully in order for her to be able to pull off this trick.
  • Exploited: With this technique, Alice is able to defeat Emperor Evulz' Zerg Rush quickly and efficiently.
  • Discussed: "Alice's weapon is a gun, that's going to imply mass murdering soon!"
  • Conversed: "Guns are always so lethal in these shows... One bullet and you've got 5 killed, if not more!"
  • Implied: Alice enters a room to face off against Bob, Charlie and Diana. The scene zooms out, only a single shot is heard. Alice exits the room, and then the scene cuts to Bob, Charlie and Diana dead on the floor.
  • Deconstructed: Alice was unaware of the gun's strength for all this time and ended up killing more people than she was supposed to, with the possibility that some of them be her allies.
  • Reconstructed: Alice vows to be more careful with her gun next time and becomes better at handling it with time.

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