Something like this, only with a modern gun?
Also, this is pretty much what Affleck did in BATMAN V SUPERMAN, right? He just comes across as a tall and broad-shouldered rich guy who growls a lot, and wears a bulletproof costume, and drives a high-powered armored car, and – well, apparently has no hang-ups about using lethal force in general, or guns in particular.
Heck, just think about all the characters who are knocked unconscious by blows to the head and who wake up a few hours later with no lasting ill effects. Lana Lang and Lex Luthor were constantly being conveniently knocked out on Smallville so Clark could do something super without being seen. By the second season, both characters should have had full-blown Parkinson’s.
I am reminded of a scene from the Batman: The Animated Series tie-in comic. The Riddler’s henchmen greet him when he gets out of prison, but he tells them he’s quitting because he’s sick and tired of always being outsmarted by Batman. One of them tries to talk him out of it, saying, “Batman gets hit on the head a lot. Maybe he’s dumber now.”
(Eventually, they convince him to give it one more try. Batman catches him… by pure happenstance while chasing other crooks who were after the same target. Hearing Batman admit that he hadn’t solved the clue, Riddler chalks it up as a victory as he cheerfully goes back to prison.)
It’s not just comic books or pulp novels or action movies, this trope is just accepted in all sorts of fiction, even sitcoms and romances. A light tap on the head, or sock on the jaw, or easily administered drug, or even just an extreme emotional shock, will cause long lasting unconsciousness that is easily reversible with absolutely no long term consequences. Except sometimes you wake up with Hollywood Amnesia.
And what’s the cure for Hollywood Amnesia?
We can judge by comic-book standards of resiliency, sure, but if we do, aren’t we also obliged to judge by comic-book standards of resurrection? The old sayings about Uncle Ben, Bucky, and Gwen Stacy have to keep getting revised. Batman himself has died and been brought back to life himself, plus he’s had or has access to Lazarus Pits. Oracle can walk now, but Jason Todd and Superman are alive now, too.
If we’re to say that Batman doesn’t cause permanent harm, despite what’s depicted, then he can “kill” a few people now and then, too. How long would the Joker stay dead?
That’s Batman in Kingdom Come. Controlling AI-enabled robots in Gotham City, from deep within the Bat-cave.
There’s always the 90s movie Batman, who directly killed people. Seems that he’s not really any different. Of course, in that universe, fate has a way of killing off his worst villains. It’s only the henchmen/mooks that get killed. So no one cares about them.
I don’t really see why you’d be obliged to do so. They’re not really related concepts. Physical violence is explicitly non-consequential in most superhero comics - by which I mean, characters say, on panel, “I knocked him out. He’ll be okay in an hour or two,” after beating someone unconscious with a blunt instrument. The impermanence of death, on the other hand, is a function of continuity bloat. It’s an indirect reference: if all of these stories are all in continuity at once, and all these different characters are in the same universe at once, then every character that died and came back in any of these other stories, technically also came back in this story, somewhere way off panel. The former is an unrealistic, but broadly consistent, genre trope. The latter is the product of an unworkable morass of contradictions and temporal paradoxes. There’s really no reason why a reader can’t accept one, and jettison the other.
“Lead bullets. Honest.”
He wouldn’t be a hero anymore. He’s be a murderer.
Heh. Brings to mind the Batman-ish vigilante ShadowHawk, who was stealthy and acrobatic even in his body armor and even when swinglining from Point A to Point B during his outings as a crimefighter who intimidates, but doesn’t kill, crooks.
He cripples them.
It would be like that scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indy shoots the showoffy sword-waving guy.
“Riddle me this, Caped Crusader! Why is an orange like a…” <BANG>