Word.ws English Dictionary

shoot first and ask questions later

shoot first and ask questions later verb: to take hasty, immediate action with serious consequences, without first adequately investigating the situation.

Verb

shoot first and ask questions later (third-person singular simple present shoots first and asks questions later, present participle shooting first and asking questions later, simple past and past participle shot first and asked questions later)

  1. (US, idiomatic) To take hasty, immediate action with serious consequences, without first adequately investigating the situation.
  2. (US, idiomatic) To act boldly.
    • “These companies are shooting first and asking questions later,” Ms. [Robin] Feldman said. “The field is expanding much faster than the legal system can keep up with. Some of the decisions being made along the way end up biting the companies that have made those decisions.”2025 December 2, Cade Metz, quoting Robin Feldman, “Silicon Valley Builds Amazon and Gmail Copycats to Train A.I. Agents”, in The New York Times, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN...

Forms of shoot first and ask questions later

third-person singular presentshoots first and asks questions later
present participleshooting first and asking questions later
past participleshot first and asked questions later
pastshot first and asked questions later

Questions about shoot first and ask questions later

What does shoot first and ask questions later mean?
Shoot first and ask questions later means to take hasty, immediate action with serious consequences, without first adequately investigating the situation.
What part of speech is shoot first and ask questions later?
Shoot first and ask questions later is a verb.
What is the past tense of shoot first and ask questions later?
The past tense of shoot first and ask questions later is shot first and asked questions later.

Words near shoot first and ask questions later in the dictionary

  1. shoot blanks
  2. shoot bug
  3. shoot bugs
  4. shoot daggers
  5. shoot down
  6. shoot first and ask questions later
  7. shoot fly
  8. shoot for the moon
  9. shoot for the stars
  10. shoot from the hip
  11. shoot from the lip

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: shoot first and ask questions later (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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