🔫 STUN GUN

Overview

The Stun Gun is the GTA series' non-lethal sidearm — a way to drop a target without killing them, useful for stealth, for keeping someone alive, or for staying off the police radar. It is modelled on a real conducted-energy weapon (a Taser), and that real-world basis, along with the weapon's documented appearances in past GTA titles, is the dependable part of this page. The GTA 6 numbers are not yet known and are not invented here.

Character & Behaviour

A stun gun trades stopping power for the option of mercy: short range, a single charge, and a recharge delay between shots, in exchange for a takedown that doesn't draw blood or, ideally, attention. In GTA V it shocked a target into helplessness at close range with a few seconds of recharge between uses. How a GTA 6 version would behave — its range, recharge, whether it stays non-lethal — has not been published, so no figures are listed.

What We Know for GTA 6

Nothing specific. No stun gun has been shown in any GTA 6 trailer, screenshot, or official post; its return is a reasonable franchise expectation given recent appearances, not a confirmed inclusion. A non-lethal option would, however, fit naturally with a game whose police and wanted systems reward avoiding a body count.

History in the GTA Series

The stun gun's GTA history is more recent than many assume. A version appeared in GTA: Chinatown Wars (labelled the "Teaser") and a working Stun Gun featured in GTA V, where Michael and Trevor could obtain one and it functioned as a close-range, non-lethal handgun. It later became fully available in GTA Online with The Contract update, sold through the Agency armoury. (A stun-gun model also exists unused in Vice City's files, but it was never a playable weapon there.) So it is an established but intermittent series item rather than a permanent fixture.

Real-World History

The real device behind it has an unusually literary origin. The Taser was developed by Jack Cover, an American aerospace scientist who had worked in the NASA orbit, starting in 1969 and completing his prototype in 1974. He named it after a childhood favourite, the 1911 adventure novel Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle: "TASER" is an acronym for "Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle" — Cover added the middle "A" himself, since it doesn't appear in the books. The weapon fires two barbed darts on thin copper wires that deliver a high-voltage, low-amperage pulse, causing temporary neuromuscular incapacitation; pressed directly against the body it works as a contact stun gun instead.

Because Cover's original used a gunpowder charge to launch the darts, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms classified it as a firearm in 1976, which throttled sales for years. The modern era began in 1993, when brothers Rick and Tom Smith — motivated by the road-rage killing of friends — acquired the technology and founded the company that became TASER International (now Axon), re-engineering the device into the compact, widely-adopted law-enforcement tool of the 1990s and after. Civilian models reach roughly 15 feet, law-enforcement versions further. It is marketed as "less-lethal" rather than non-lethal — an important real-world distinction the games tend to gloss over by treating it as cleanly harmless.

How to Obtain

Unconfirmed for GTA 6. No price, vendor, spawn point, or unlock has been announced, so none is listed here rather than guessed.

Frequently Asked Questions

Last updated May 31, 2026.