What is "sawn-off"

Usage examples of "sawn-off".

There were the black sacks, as ripe as bodybags, and there was the sawn-off metal door of a flat-roofed go-down.

Jackie Crawford was somewhere in this crowd, somewhere shaking hands with people whom, a scant four years before, he might have been terrorising with a sawn-off shotgun.

Two of them hefted police-type billies, one bore a sawn-off pool cue and the foremost held an elegant-looking walking stick that Rupen was dead certain concealed a steel blade.

Things haltingly stirred to life, a ballerina with empty eye sockets elevating itself en pointe, a sawn-off oem-media dell'arte Punchinello grinning with malice and shaking a bell-cuffed fist at unseen enemies.

Like all PAs that autumn, Daysee wandered round clutching a clipboard and a stopwatch, wearing loose trousers tucked into sawn-off suede boots, and jerseys with pictures knitted on the front.

A third policeman was standing upright and almost completely hidden behind the nearest petrol pump, but there was nothing hidden about his gun, that most lethal of all close-quarters weapons, a whipper, a sawn-off handgrip shotgun firing 20-gauge medium-lead shot.

I turned my head and saw the little Indian, still in black but without his jacket now, sitting on the other side of the hatch with his sawn-off shotgun across his knees.

Luigi reached under the bar and pulled out a sap and a sawn-off shotgun, and an old Colt Peacemaker.

But it was far too late for warnings, or for prisoners to suggest what police escorts should do, when the barrels of a sawn-off shotgun rammed through the open driver's window and ground viciously into the young constable's throat while, simultaneously, two straddle-legged figures appeared at the tailgate of the Land Rover, levelling a Spanish Z-6z and a Czech - or maybe it was a Polish submachine gun at its other occupants.

The pea jacket was unbuttoned and from under it he brought out a sawn-off shotgun.

Rupert was standing beside him clutching a sawn-off shotgun and Harry, the barman from the Bull and Bell, appeared in the loft at the other side of the building, some sort of revolver in his hand.

A sawn-off shotgun spreads so quickly that I hadn't a hope in hell of really hurting him where he stood which was a good twenty paces away.

His helmet looked like nothing more than a sawn-off carboy, with a tuft of broom-straw stuck in the neck for a crest and a snoutish visor made from a wine-magnum riveted to the facial region.