I've always believed that the phrase "bust a cap in yo ass" was AAVE for:
To shoot an individual with a gun.
Whilst trying to figure out what the cap actually meant, I ran into this alternate definition/footnote:
This is not a new phrase as much of the Rap culture would like us to believe. Instead it is an old phrase to shoot someone. Reference to cap is a word for powder cap used in percussion guns popular in the old west. This phrase is used in the 1969 movie titled "True Grit" with John Wayne, Glen Campbell, Dennis Hopper and Robert Duvall.
Line by Ned Pepper (played by Robert Duvall) "I never busted a cap (bust a cap) on a woman or nobody under sixteen. But I'll do it."
Ned Pepper's line can be confirmed via Wikiquote. Additionally percussion caps appear to have primarily been in use during the 1800s and were phased out in favour of primers. The events in True Grit are set in the 1870s.
I'd like to know where this expression came from and how it made its transition into AAVE. Did pop a cap … also make the same journey? Is the phrase still in use today by other Americans?
Best Answer
Copper caps
The origin is from the use of percussion caps or gun caps, a piece of copper used for igniting the powder in guns.
The first use in the OED is from around 1826:
Bursted a cap
The OED has burst a cap from 1838, which you can read in context here:
Another early example can be found in the Extra Globe from 1839:
Bursting
The verb bursting was used in the technical literature of firearms. For example, in Newton's London journal of arts and sciences (1837) has details on William Westley Richards "invention of certain improvements in primers for discharging firearms by means of percussion". Here's a description of figure 16:
It seems to have been quite common in the late 19th century in books about the American Civil War and later in cowboy stories. It can be found in some court reports.
More recently
The Concise New Partridge Dictionary of Slang (2007) gives:
Cop Talk: A Dictionary of Police Slang (2000) shows a variant:
Law enforcement vocabulary (1973):
Two early uses in AAVE are in Henry Williamson's autobiography Hustler! (1965), edited by R. Lincoln Kaiser:
...
A possible AAVE use can be found in John Oliver Killens' first novel Youngblood (1956), "dealing with a fictional black Georgia family in the early 1900s":
Still I Rise: A Graphic History of African Americans (2009) by Roland and Taneshia Nash Laird suggests it entered AAVE around the 1950s:
The comic was published in the October 1955 issue of Hep Magazine, and here's the comic itself, courtesy of the Ladies Making Comics blog.