May 05, 2004
Automatic for the people
When the construction worker Isidro Mejia was recently rushed to an L.A. hospital, doctors didn't expect him to live. His nailgun had accidentally gone off and embedded four nails in his skull and one in his spinal column. It took doctors five days to fully extract all the steel from his head.
And how, might you ask, did this poor guy wind up in this state? As the BBC reports:
"His colleagues said Isidro was using a nailgun that has both manual and fully automatic settings," said deputy sheriff Dan McPherson.
They make fully automatic nail guns? Good grief. Why not just outfit construction workers with AK-47s? Interestingly, a Google search for "automatic nail gun" mostly turns up pages that describe nail-gun fighting techniques in first-person shooter video games, as well as stories from The Journal of Light Construction discussing the troublesome industry regulations that are preventing nail-gun manufacturers from developing, you know, nuclear powered home-improvement weapons. Er, tools.
(Thanks to Debbie for this one!)
Posted by Clive Thompson at May 05, 2004 01:54 PM
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A few years ago I was helping do some construction work for a friend, and he had a nail gun. There's a trigger, and there's also a spring loaded safety mechanism located at the end of the barrel (the, uhm, muzzle?) where it had to be depressed before it would fire. So what he did was to hold the trigger down, and smack the gun where he wanted a nail, depressing the safety and voila -- a nail where you want it. The thing is, if you keep it depressed then it'll keep on shooting nails, Quake style. I remember thinking when I first used it that it really wasn't that hard to get a bit of duct tape and tape back the safety device, turning it into a homemade machine gun. Hate to think what sort of malicious damage you could do with that...
Lord yes. That's an excellent story!
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