Despite shooting a wide range of firearms during his Live And Let Die. As opposed to Sean Connery's tougher portrayal, Moore's Bond was more of a charmer who was never short of a dry quip or pun. The star would end up playing 007 through seven movies, reaching franchise highs like The Spy Who Loved Me or lows such as his final outing A View To A Kill.
Roger Moore's wittier, more light-hearted take on James Bond was a huge hit with audiences, but it feels like his successors have largely moved away from that tone. His successor Timothy Dalton played a gritter Bond who was truer to the original novels, while Daniel Craig's era also featured a darker take on the spy. Pierce Brosnan's run was somewhat of a mix, though the backlash to the goofy nightmare of Die Another Day proved the series needed a more grounded reinvention.
While the James Bond series often features the spy using vehicles or his trusty gadgets to take on bad guys, he naturally relies on guns quite a bit. The character is famous for carrying his trusty Walter PPK, but throughout Moore's run, the actor used everything from a .44 Magnum in Live And Let Die to various assault rifles in Octopussy. Even fans of Moore may have noted something of a mild discomfort that star appeared to have while firing weapons, as he tended to blink while shooting. It turns out he had some of a dislike of weapons, which stemmed from two incidents in his youth.
In his memoir My Word Is My Bond, Moore recounted being shot in the leg with a BB gun as a teenager, and on the A View To A Kill commentary track, he recounted a more intense experience. While taking a refresher training course in the army, he was handed a weapon that had a blocked breach, and when he fired it, it more or less exploded in his hand. This left him deafened for a few days and gave him a lifelong fear that every time he shot a weapon, it might malfunction in the same way.
On that same A View To A Kill track, Roger Moore revealed the movie was his least favorite, partly because of the violence, which included Christopher Walken's villain mowing down his henchmen with an Uzi in the finale. Moore's views on guns didn't soften in his later years, with the actor once telling the James Bond days, that "I regret that sadly heroes, in general, are depicted with guns in their hands, and to tell the truth I have always hated guns and what they represent."
