take off one's gloves

take off one's gloves (third-person singular simple present takes off one's gloves, present participle taking off one's gloves, simple past took off one's gloves, past participle taken off one's gloves)

1. To be unrestrained, especially in acting in a violent or punitive manner.
   • 1952, United States. Congress, Congressional Record, page 8391:

     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.

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

     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.

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

     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.

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

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

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

• gloves are off
• kid-glove