shoot to kill

idiom

: to shoot a gun with the purpose of killing someone

Examples of shoot to kill in a Sentence

Recent Examples on the Web
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The idea was to shoot to kill but also to scare them off, to move them away from the most densely populated areas. Literary Hub, 18 July 2025 The season opens with the revelation that Player 246, a.k.a single dad Gyeong-seok, didn’t die in the rebellion; pink soldier No-eul didn’t shoot to kill. Jennifer Zhan, Vulture, 27 June 2025 And even when the distressed person threatens them with a weapon, police don’t always shoot to kill; in the case of Faisal, an officer fired only after a nonlethal sponge round failed to slow him. Laura Crimaldi, BostonGlobe.com, 3 June 2023 Another military intervention by Moscow in another former Soviet state with clear echoes of the Cold War. Bolstered by the Kremlin, the president's regained a fragile control, ordering his forces to shoot to kill. ABC News, 9 Jan. 2022 The act grants soldiers wide-ranging powers to search, detain, arrest or shoot to kill people and gives them immunity from prosecution unless the government makes an exception, which rarely occurs. Washington Post, 6 Dec. 2021 Shoot to kill, see an antifa, shoot to kill. Dallas News, 12 Oct. 2022 They are trained to shoot to kill. Alaa Elassar, CNN, 7 July 2022 But now, primarily through crowdsourcing, human rights groups and activists are beginning to document a reign of terror that got underway well before the shoot to kill order. New York Times, 31 Jan. 2022

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“Shoot to kill.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/shoot%20to%20kill. Accessed 24 Jul. 2025.

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