The Dredd lawgiver.
The Lawgiver-2 is a fictional, futuristic, voice-activated machine pistol seen in the 2012 film Dredd.
The Lawgiver has a built-in suppressor and multiple ammunition types that can be seen on an LCD screen built onto the left-hand side of the weapon.
Abilities and ammunition[]
- Full Metal Jacket (FMJ): standard execution ammunition used in response to generic situations.
- 'Rapid fire (RAPID)': fully automatic fire option used to deal with large numbers of people.
- 'Armor-Piercing (AP)': ammunition used to deal with Robots or lifeforms wearing body armor. Armor-Piercing rounds are also powerful enough to go through cover or multiple unarmored perps.
- 'Stun (S)': Can be used in standoff situations to allow Judges to stop people who are in the way.
- Incendiary (INC): partially explosive chemical rounds that ignite whatever target they hit.
- 'High-Explosive (Hi-Ex)': these rounds can be used when a situation calls for a forced entry into an area and there isn't time to wait for heavier reinforcements.
- 'Hot-shot (HS)': rounds that lock on and seek targets by their body-heat. Can be used in combination with incendiary rounds.
The "Hot Shot" round used in the standoff in the beginning of the movie, although carrying the nickname of the Heat Seeker round, is more of a focused pyrotechnic. The incendiary round proper serves as a white-phosphorous cluster-grenade. The Lawgiver also has a digital screen that indicates what type of rounds are to be fired (e.g. when Dredd commands "High Ex", the display says "HIGH EX", showing that "High Ex" has been selected). Like the comic, the Lawgiver had additional security features to prevent the weapon from falling into the wrong hands and used for sinister purposes, so if an individual other than the judge it was registered to attempted to fire the gun, it self-destructed, blowing the person's arm off. This happened to Kay, resulting in his death.
The screen readout shows that a full magazine supposedly carries 50 FMJ (Full Metal Jacketed, or "Standard" ammo), 25 AP (Armor-Piercing), 25 IN (Incendiary) and 25 HE (High Explosive) rounds.The "D" reading in the lower left-hand corner is the distance to the target in meters. If the clip is near empty (at 10% or less), the screen has an "AMMUNITION LOW" warning.
Development[]
In a special feature of the Dredd DVD, it is revealed that the Lawgiver used in the film uses three separate high-capacity magazines housing separate kinds of ammunition simultaneously, as opposed to the comics where all kinds of ammunition are fired from one universal magazine. This culminates to a moment in the film where Dredd's Lawgiver runs out of all forms of ammunition except for High Explosive rounds. It was essentially just a mocked-up, suppressed Glock 17 with a metal slide furniture shell and compensator cuts. The Glock is a polymer-framed pistol that real police officers use.
The weapon's prop magazine well in front of the trigger took a mocked-up magazine full of inert projectiles; the pistol's real magazine in the grip was loaded with blanks. The way the Lawgiver operates in Rapid Fire mode seems to have been based off how a Glock 18 operates.
The "Silencer" used in Silenced Mode was an integral unit in a sleeve around the barrel that extended over the muzzle.