take off one's gloves

present singular third person takes off one's gloves · participle present taking off one's gloves · past took off one's gloves · participle past taken off one's gloves

1. To be unrestrained, especially in acting in a violent or punitive manner.

   The Court is willing to take off its gloves for the most serious infringements, however.

   2017, András Jakab, Dimitry Kochenov, The Enforcement of EU Law and Values

   3 more examples

   The public's duty is to take the role of prosecutor in seeking out the truth: and we ought to roll up our sleeves, take off the gloves, and wade into action.

   1952, United States. Congress, Congressional Record, page 8391

   Ben-Gurion's self-restraint was soon exhausted and the British now took off their gloves to crush the Arabs by all and any means: they collectively punished villages and at one point destroyed a whole neighbourhood of Jaffa.

   2011, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Jerusalem: The Biography – A History of the Middle East, page 541

   So, for example, in the midst of social tensions and manpower shortages in Britain (December 1916), David Lloyd George came to head a war regime which took off its gloves in handling the domestic unrest and keeping dissidents, like Siegfried Sassoon and his famous antiwar letter, out of the public eye.

   2015, Hunt Tooley, The Great War: Western Front and Home Front, page 208

   Antonyms: handle with kid gloves, treat with kid gloves

2. Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see take off, glove.