But not destroyed. One can still reverse-engineer sufficiently, over time, unless the deactivation process magically disintegrates the electronic circuit boards and other wooziewozzles within or, in the case of a phaser, one gets it to work and - woops! - disintegrates one's self with the energy recursively disintegrating the weapon in hand. Neat trick... The maguffins and quick and dirty cheats to "resolve" a storyline never really work, usually because the episode time allotment has run out and most of the allotted time was allocated to the earlier acts...
