How to Use trigger-happy in a Sentence

trigger-happy

adjective

• Dancing next to the procession of kids and the trigger-happy xylophone infant.
  — Raven Smith, Vogue, 22 July 2024
• The trigger-happy tradition to shoot guns in the air at midnight on New Years Eve has gone on for decades.
  — Natalie Davies, Detroit Free Press, 27 Dec. 2024
• But one member of the team, a trigger-happy meathead, reacts out of fear and mistrust, slamming the door shut on the water column.
  — Jenny Odell, Longreads, 2 June 2026
• His novel of the same name features an urban standoff between a lawman and a trigger-happy outlaw with a citywide blackmail plot.
  — Brett Williams, Men's Health, 1 Aug. 2023
• Ricki Tarr is not a trigger-happy super-spy but a low-level field agent who happens to be a bit of a romantic gentleman.
  — Elliott Smith and Chris Bellamy, EW.com, 23 May 2024
• Add to the mix the trigger-happy culture of hiring and firing traders, and the hunt for clever managers is as important as stellar returns and raising cash.
  — Tribune News Service, The Mercury News, 21 June 2024
• As the table below shows, the number of cautions for dissent rose sharply — but referees were most trigger-happy in a season’s early stages.
  — Cerys Jones, New York Times, 21 Aug. 2025
• But Roman, destroyed with grief, has embraced abject nihilism along with the trigger-happy thrill of sitting in Dad’s chair.
  — Lauren Puckett-Pope, ELLE, 16 May 2023
• The instructors wear orange guns with rubber bullets, and some have become unnervingly trigger-happy.
  — Bilge Ebiri, Vulture, 2 Feb. 2026
• Worst off were grizzly bears, who overwhelmingly perished near roads—not because they were struck by cars, though that happened, but because roads pumped the woods full of trigger-happy humans.
  — Ben Goldfarb, Smithsonian Magazine, 13 Feb. 2024
• The Iranian government has long maintained a rather trigger-happy approach to censorship, to put it mildly.
  — David Ehrlich, IndieWire, 28 Jan. 2026
• We should be asked how our youth retain the impulse to be free when trigger-happy Israeli soldiers and snipers are ordered to kill unarmed children demanding their human rights.
  — Literary Hub, 11 Feb. 2026
• Read Michael Fuchs's analysis on why diplomacy is the most realistic option for dealing with the trigger-happy rogue state.
  — Foreign Affairs, 19 Jan. 2018
• As played by Paul Newman, William Bonney is a trigger-happy hothead who’s more misunderstood than evil.
  — Keith Phipps, Vulture, 18 July 2025
• When Orsolya knocks on the man’s door with an army of trigger-happy policemen at her back, the bailiff — in her infinite mercy — agrees to give the guy some time to collect his belongings.
  — David Ehrlich, IndieWire, 19 Feb. 2025
• Rifle Club is a trigger-happy world where violence is almost poetically portrayed.
  — Sweta Kaushal, Forbes, 23 Jan. 2025
• On one hand, some argue that Good was attempting to leave the scene, and a trigger-happy ICE agent fired his weapon at her, an abuse of authority.
  — Andrew Adeolu, CBS News, 11 Jan. 2026
• Such people may be jumpy, irritable, violent, trigger-happy, drugged out, avoidant, defeated, morose, or self-harming, for reasons that no one can recall.
  — George Makari, The New Yorker, 13 July 2023
• On the other hand, post-Soviet Russia’s nuclear strategy seemed more trigger-happy than before.
  — Olga Oliker, Foreign Affairs, 15 Oct. 2018
• The affair grows less decorous in farcical scenes of upstairs and downstairs life — kitchen staff toiling away on blunts, a trigger-happy shooting party, and cockney pub patrons breaking out in song — and the various side plots.
  — Elaina Patton, IndieWire, 3 Dec. 2025
• But don't be too trigger-happy with a cancellation, advises Leigh Matthews, a therapist in Barcelona who has worked with thousands of nervous travelers.
  — Christopher Elliott, Forbes.com, 28 June 2025
• Behind the decks, a mischievous, trigger-happy DJ Próvaí occasionally came in a beat too early, adding an air of levity to the occasion.
  — Sophie Williams, Billboard, 19 Sep. 2025
• Critics often portray Truman's decision as an act of monstrous brutality—a flex of raw military might by a sadistic and trigger-happy superpower.
  — Josh Hammer, MSNBC Newsweek, 8 Aug. 2025
• The screenplay even pays tribute to the island’s anti-fascist heritage with an elderly, trigger-happy partisan shooting from her balcony and singing Communist songs with the Mayor.
  — Alissa Simon, Variety, 16 Aug. 2024
• Torched by the Warriors from 3-point range last Sunday, Denver limited the trigger-happy Celtics to a 12-for-43 clip downtown.
  — Bennett Durando, Denver Post, 26 Feb. 2026
• This ending would be shocking in any register, but the fact that Ben is the film’s sole Black character and that his would-be rescuers are an all-white posse of trigger-happy militiamen delivers a truly shattering blow.
  — Adam Lowenstein, The Conversation, 30 Oct. 2025
• Executive Director Nadav Weiman, a veteran who served in Gaza but not in this war, said distance from the target and some trigger-happy soldiers can be problematic.
  — Sam Mednick, Los Angeles Times, 30 May 2026
• Rattled by the mystery of the bull, Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min), the bumbling, trigger-happy police chief of Hope Harbor, drives back into town and is confronted with a disaster zone.
  — Justin Chang, New Yorker, 4 Sep. 2026
• Any Omega discovered within a colony’s borders is arrested to be exiled beyond the wall, or terminated on sight in cases where a trigger-happy government worker thinks their life is threatened by an Omega simply shouting.
  — Josh Slater-Williams, IndieWire, 11 Aug. 2025
• The most notorious and admired of the gangster breed was the stylish and trigger-happy John Dillinger, a criminal so popular that the Hays office forbade Hollywood from producing any film based on his exploits.
  — Thomas Doherty, The Hollywood Reporter, 7 July 2023