Best Meme Guns: Pop Culture Pistols, Rifles, & Shotguns

Internet culture and gun culture have an interesting crossover.

The internet is a breeding ground for pop culture to spread its wings and fly. And with guns being so prevalent in pop culture, the intrigue surrounding firearms has worked its way into every corner of the globe.

Interest has been fostered from both the East and the West, with strong gun influence emanating everywhere, from anime to John Wick.

But as always, the internet is both a savage and funny place, and that internet culture combined with pop culture tropes has led to several guns becoming memes. 

What’s a Meme Gun?

Meme gun is a term often applied to firearms that have gained notoriety, but not necessarily based on their merit.

While some might have plenty of merits, they have become known due to vast amounts of exposure from pop culture. Some of these guns are silly, some are ridiculous, and others are downright eye-rolling. 

These guns find themselves in traditional internet memes, as well as becoming fodder for jokes, image board posting, and beyond. They have been elevated by both culture and the internet into a rather silly status regardless of their strengths and weaknesses. 

With that in mind, I’ve gathered what I think are the best meme guns, or at the least the guns that make the best memes. 

Top Meme Guns

1. Desert Eagle

The hulking Desert Eagle is a gun that has been a part of pop culture for decades.  

It’s a gun that has forced its way into the greater pop culture conversation and into memory through sheer force of will. 

The Desert Eagle is a magnum-powered handgun designed to fire .357 Magnum, .44 Magnum, .50 AE, and a few other calibers. It’s a gas-operated handgun with a rotating bolt that’s all sorts of odd and unique. 

Hollywood made this gun what it is today. It’s been in over 600 movies, with innumerable appearances in video games, TV shows, and other media.

A distinctive and massive, striking profile, along with the promise of hard-hitting calibers, make it eye-catching and legendary. 

In film and video games, it’s often the ultimate combat pistol, while in real life, it’s somewhat large, heavy recoiling, and generally too clunky to be useful for duty or defense.

The meme status comes from the striking contrast between the gun’s reputation in film and video games compared to its real-life performance.

Another big contributor to this gun’s internet success is the fact Magnum Research makes so many interesting finishes and colors. 

I mean, come on…a gold tiger stripe .50 caliber Desert Eagle just screams meme.

Learn more about the Desert Eagle in our reviews of the Mark XIX .50AE and Mark XIX .429.

2. Hi-Point Pistols

Hi-Point is an American company with a noble goal — making semi-auto firearms at a low cost that work reasonably well and are backed by a great warranty.

The company makes a variety of pistols in .380 ACP, 9mm, .40 S&W, 45 ACP, and 10mm. They are simple blowback-operated firearms that all offer the same general layout in some simple size variations.

This may sound all well and good, but what makes these guns meme-worthy is a fourfold argument. 

First, they are super cheap and butt ugly. I say this as a Hi-Point owner — they are not pretty guns.

The blowback action requires a massive slide, the finish is ugly, and the pot metal material gives it an odd look. 

Another contribution to their memory is the show Gangland, which famously showed a masked gang member with a modulated voice saying, “This is my Glock .40 problem solver.” while flashing a rusty Hi-Point.

Hi-Point seemed to lean into this bit, producing a model with a finish made up of $100 bills.

Lastly, they used an open internet poll to name their newest gun. As the internet does, they picked their favorite word of the time, and ‘Yeet Cannon’ won the poll in a landslide. 

At first, Hi-Point balked at Yeet Cannon due to a misunderstanding of the phrase. However, they eventually embraced it and even produced a C9 Yeet Cannon edition, which I proudly own.

Leaning into the meme seemed to work well for Hi-Point; I, like many other folks, bought one on the name alone. 

Check out more in our review of the C9.

3. Standard DP-12

There is something so cool about a double-barreled shotgun. They are elegant, often beautiful, and deliciously old school.

Although they have been widely rendered obsolete, they remain widely produced firearms because we love them. 

When Standard Manufacturing said they were producing a double barrel, no one said much. But when that double barrel turned out to be a pump action shotgun, everyone was a little shaken.

The biggest question was, “Why?” and it’s a valid one. 

Double barrel shotguns are supposed to be lithe, light, easy to swing, and elegant. The DP-12 is a double barrel, dual magazine fed, pump action, bullpup shotgun.

It’s arguably a home defense-style gun, but it’s honestly a little sillier than that. 

What made it a meme is that they made a cartoon gun a reality. 90s kids will remember the gruff and rough tavern owner Moe from the Simpsons.

His firearm of choice for bar defense was a double-barrel pump action shotgun. It was of a conventional layout, but the DP-12 is as close as we’ll ever get to Moe’s shotgun.

Another factor in the gun’s meme status is how absurd it is. Having two barrels on a pump action isn’t really beneficial.

It makes the gun more complicated, much heavier, and more expensive. The DP-12 has none of the benefits of a traditional double barrel and a ton of drawbacks. 

Sometimes, just making a gun this ridiculous is enough to achieve memedom. 

4. That Massive Heritage Rough Rider

Heritage Manufacturing’s budget-priced Rough Rider has been the first gun of many and a favorite for youth shooters.

These single-action, Colt SAA-style clones are chambered for the affordable .22 LR and .22 Magnum cartridges. 

They are super cheap, and Heritage makes a ton of variations. This includes everything from standard 6-inch models to the 1-inch barreled Barkeep Boot, all the way up to the topic of this section, the ridiculous 16-inch Rough Rider.

It’s utterly ridiculous to stick a rifle-length barrel onto the frame of a handgun. What’s even more ridiculous is that they didn’t give it a cool name.

The Barkeep and Boot have neat names, but the 16-inch model is just the Rough Rider.

I think it’s obvious the ridiculousness of the barrel length is what makes it so meme-worthy. 

Another factor in the gun’s memery comes from the 1989 Batman movie. The Joker has an S&W Model 15 with a telescoping barrel, which has drawn many comparisons to the long Rough Rider.

Heritage even acknowledged this and produced a special model with Joker grips.

Yep, we did a full review on the 16-inch version — you can check it out here.

5. Pfeifer Zeliska . 600 Nitro Express Revolver

If you’ve spent any time on the internet, there is a decent chance you’ve seen a picture of the Pfeifer Zeliska .600 Nitro Express Revolver.

It’s a massive gun that fires a gigantic bullet and is comically large, making it great for image boards and email chains. 

The Pfeifer Zeliska .600 Nitro Express Revolver is 22 inches in length and weighs over 13 pounds. The cylinder by itself weighs 4.5 pounds.

.600 Nitro Express exists to kill big game and would normally go in what you’d commonly call an elephant gun. It’s absolutely absurd to chamber a revolver or any handgun in this cartridge.

Each round weighs 900 grains and costs around $40 a shot. The gun itself isn’t cheap, either. They are made in Austria and cost over $17,000.

What’s the purpose of this gun? One could argue it’s for hunting, but let’s be honest, someone wanted to build one, so they did.

Gun companies always try to justify their ludicrous designs when, in reality, all you need to say is because we wanted to. 

What made this gun a meme were those folks who shared the original photo of a man holding the gun and its ridiculous size in comparison.

6. The Draco

Sometimes, a gun becomes the name brand for an entire genre of guns, like how we call all tissues Kleenex. The Draco is the Kleenex of AK pistols. 

The Romanian-made Draco guns have long been imported by Century Arms and enjoyed relative popularity.

What really propelled these AK pistols to memedom is their prominence in rap and hip-hop lyrics. 

The Draco has replaced mentions of the Uzi and Tec-9 in the world of hip-hop. Entire albums have been named Draco, with the weapon prominently displayed on the cover, and it has appeared in tons of music videos. 

Its obnoxiously small size and massive muzzle flash certainly make it fun to shoot, especially when mag dumping into the trash is your only goal.

These days, any AK pistol is called a Draco, regardless of what it actually is. Century Arms has named every AK pistol Draco, including their 9mm variants.

That kind of popularity has led to everything from Draco patches to T-shirts and more. They are awesome guns, but definitely meme-tier. 

Interested in the Draco? We have a full review on the Draco ready for you to read.

7. Glock 37, 38, and 39

My last pick is almost always a wildcard, and for the last meme gun, I sought out opinions from the internet.

I hosted an open poll amongst friends and fellow gun enthusiasts. Eventually, someone said anything in .45 GAP. That got massive votes and comments, and it was the clear people’s choice. 

A big part of memes is irony, and this often means failed or silly ideas become the focus of the meme community.

Glock doesn’t have many failures, but the .45 GAP is definitely one of them. 

In the early 2000s, the world was sure that .45 ACP was still better; they thought a bigger bullet was better. So Glock set out to create a .45 caliber gun with a thinner grip design than their .45 ACP Glock 21.

They shorted the case, increased the pressure, and reinforced the case head to prevent blowouts. They replicated the .45 ACP ballistics and velocity in a cartridge with an overall length of 27.2 mms. 

The end result was the Glock 37, 38, and 39 chambered in .45 GAP (Glock Automatic Pistol). It seems like a neat idea, but it was silly. No one really wanted what Glock was selling.

If you wanted a .45 ACP, you just bought the  .45 ACP with easy-to-find ammo. If you wanted a thinner frame, you bought a 9mm and .40 S&W.

The abject failure of these guns and the .45 GAP made it a bit of a laughing stock. I remember the few police agencies that adopted these guns practically giving them away when they replaced them.

Since then, the .45 GAP has remained a bit of a joke amongst gun owners and most certainly a meme about solving a problem that wasn’t there in the first place. 

Final Thoughts

There are a lot of wild designs, running jokes, and funny memes that are gun-centric or gun-adjacent. We just wanted to cover a few out of pure interest and maybe get a little chuckle out of it along the way.

What do you think makes a meme gun? Do you have a favorite to add to the list? Let us know in the comments below! Like this content? Be sure to cruise on over and check out our entire article lineup of Guns of Pop Culture!