Here’s a story of a gun-fondling nitwit compounding mistake upon mistake.
First, he thinks his hobby of shooting bullets at things very fast is fascinating enough that he brings along someone to record his manly bang-bangs.
Secondly, he has a target: a lawnmower. Why a lawnmower? Does he just hate yardwork? Maybe it was an evil lawnmower.
Thirdly, the lawnmower is not sufficiently exciting, so he packs it with three pounds of high explosives.
You know, lawnmowers on their own can be dangerous: when running, they can send rocks flying; I once had a lawnmower blade break in normal operation, and a chunk went flying and imbedded itself in a tree. But at least this guy didn’t have it running. I don’t think. Then, of course, there’s the problem of firing a rifle at a solid metal object, the engine. I would think there’s some risk of ricochets there.
But no, all that is irrelevant. He packed it with explosives. All the other safety concerns become moot.
He shot it, it exploded, sharp pieces of metal went flying everywhere (surprise!), and shrapnel severs one of his legs.
He did something incredibly stupid, but didn’t deserve maiming. Maybe someone will learn that demolishing stuff with firepower isn’t entertaining or clever, though.
More likely someone will learn that this is yet another false flag operation by Obama to take away everyone’s guns so that he can have his army of illegal Mexican Muslims round up all the Christians and put them in gay Sharia FEMA camps.
I hope he spends most of his waking time reflecting on the fact that the handle between the line from the mower to his leg, and the line from the mower to his neck, was really, really small, and that it’s only thanks to that small difference that the stupidest thing he’d ever done in his life wasn’t the last thing he’d ever done in his life…
so… any moron in this guys area can just walk up to their local hardware store and buy 3 pounds of high explosive or what?
the stupid, it doesn’t burn here… it oozes like pus.
but I’m sure he’s one of those “responsible” gun owners, right?
smh.
too bad it didn’t cut off his third leg. maybe he wouldn’t be able to contaminate any offspring with his utter stupidity.
Would that really have made a difference? I’m pretty sure 3 pounds of explosives trumps a 1-1/2 HP lawn mower engine, running or not.
Where are the Mythbusters when you need them?
ah, no. ANYONE can buy this shit online… as much as you want!
and it’s not illegal at all.
WTF?
soooo glad I moved away from dumbfuckistan before someone accidentally blew me up while trying to film themselves blowing up an old car or something.
seriously, I could easily imagine half the people I knew back in the desert pulling a stunt like this.
ugh.
Yep. Having a gun makes you SO much safer.
do you really think so?
I think just the opposite. Right now, as I type this, there are hundreds of teenagers and complete dumbfucks who saw that video now anxious to order some “Tammerite” so they can blow up their old skateboard, or the neighbor’s dog, or things I can’t even and don’t want to imagine.
because they all think that kind of shit only happens to the OTHER dumb guys. never happens to them. nope, nosiree!
I remember thinking JUST that when I was a young teen. “Kid blows his hand off with an m80? lol, must have been an idiot… never could happen to me.” after nearly doing something nearly as stupid as this guy did… I learned, without permanent injury thankfully, but it was scary as hell, and I KNOW that watching a vid like this one would have not discouraged me… at all. And I was in the “gifted” program. imagine someone dumb AND young.
I expect lots of body parts will be lost as a result of this company’s business.
I can’t really judge…I did things WAY more stupid with explosives and got paid for it. Still, one hopes he learned a valuable lesson about doing stupid shit…or at least he learned something about standoff distance.
Does “to keep and bear arms” include explosives?
“Hold my beer and watch this” is not an exaggeration.
So would that be considered a good lawnmower with a gun?
re 4:
Where are the Mythbusters? you ask.
Answer : to blame.
They had so much fun exploding stuff, that even their mild warning, “Don’t try this at home, EVER!”, was insufficient at keeping [redacted] from imitating them. They made it look like so much fun. And also to document it with video cams and all; for posterity, and to show everyone at every get-together they host.
aaarrrrrgggghhhhh,
This [redacted] was so close to qualifying for the mythical Darwin Award, missed it by just a few inches….
excellent Monday morning news /sarcasm
…or lawnmowers?
…or explosive lawnmowers?
can’t be. never received proper training.
it’s a bad lawnmower.
BAD LAWNMOWER!
*hits it with newspaper*
Don’t hit lawnmowers with a newspaper! You never know when they might be stuffed full of explosives!
lol
Playing with explosives isn’t a good idea any way. Those guys did it from a small distance, standing up (increasing the area exposed to shrapnel), without any kind of shielding and the mower was fucking uphill from them. They could have lost so much more than one leg. Did they get anything right by chance? I don’t think they did.
rietpluim @ 9
Explosives which can blow your arms off. I don’t know.
Here’s the Wikipedia entry for tannerlite. Since it’s a binary product it’s apparently not considered an explosive under US law until the two compenents are mixed, and hence there aren’t federal restrictions on its sale.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tannerite
wikipedia:
If that had been a muslim group, the federal authorities would be throwing everyone in jail for practicing at making bombs that maximize the number of deaths.
Let me be the FIRST to say it: “If ONLY there’d been more guns, this wouldn’t have happened.”
.
Maybe I’m too morbid but I think it was great! Right up there with the two nutcases in Phoenix in 1982 who shot a saguaro cactus off with a shotgun, and it fell on the leader. He’d bled to death by the time help arrived.
I suppose the right to bear arms supersedes the right to bear legs.
I don’t know if it’s been mentioned here or not, but I also heard yesterday that a gun store owner was killed when he was hit by a stray bullet during a firearms safety class.
If only that lawnmower had a gun, none of this tragedy would have occurred.
Serves him right for using bad language.
Well, obviously nobody deserves maiming. We rightly object when people consider the removal of body parts to be adequate punishment. But I don’t think I can muster much sympathy for him.
Help, yes. Treatment, yes.
Like some of you, I too wondered about the legality of buying Tannerite. Really? And here I thought that after the Oklahoma City bombing explosives and their precursors were hard to come by for the average dude. You can’t go into your local garden supply store and buy bags of ammonium nitrate fertilizer without arousing the attention of the FBI. But apparently you can buy large quantities of Tannerite and make what amounts to a deadly bomb in your backyard. I don’t get it. This country really is a maddening, inconsistent mess.
Which is strange given that Tannerite is ammonium nitrate with aluminium as the fuel. Of course once you have Ammonium nitrate so many things can be used as fuel: sugar, diesel, flour, CoffeeMate, coal dust, iron filings – i.e. anything that can be burned or oxidized.
The Tannerite website gushes over how ‘safe’ it is. Provided you’re 100 yards or more away, use the pre-packaged small quantities and pack it in a plastic container. Of course any red blooded, patriotic, responsible gun owner is going to double, or triple or even ten up the quantities, pack them into a car and stand 50′ away (those AR15 aren’t very accurate)
How many people remember children’s chemistry sets? Or being able to but sulfur and saltpeter at the pharmacy?
I’m surprised I lived past childhood.
I don’t know but while they may have been inspired by Mythbusters they could just as easily been inspired by Dumb and Dumber. The thing I find the most interesting about Mythbusters is the safety procedures they employ in everyone of the experiments and demonstrations they show all of which are lacking here.
there are places out here where people go away from everyone and shoot. They are not organized or even sanction in many cases. There are always remnants of various kinds of ordinary items shot full if holes just a few yards from the firing line including blown up propane tanks among other stuff.
I have heard that there is a cure for ignorant but there is no cure for stupid.
uncle frogy
@12 slithey tove
For all their explosive hijinks, the Mythbusters seemed to be at their stupidest when it came to lawnmowers (okay, the homemade cannon at a small local bomb range was dumb too).
In their “Accidental Ammo” episode, where they investigated the possibility of launching rocks at lethal velocities from a lawnmower, Adam just fired up a gas mower and pushed it over a line of garden stones. Oh, don’t worry, he had eye, ear, and hand protection, which is what you should use just running a lawnmower anyway–in other words, no remote mower build, no shield mounted on the mower, no body armor, just plain ol’ laughs and winging it.
Yeah, Mythbusters could be thoughtless and stupid at times, but that was one of their dumbest approaches to starting a myth. They upped the idiotic ante at the end of the episode with Jamie constructing a big electric (for more torque and more danger) riding lawnmower that used two heavy steel blades which quickly broke off at high speed and amazingly didn’t send anybody to the hospital. At the end I was thinking the real myth was “How dumb can Adam and Jamie get?”
My best guess for all this nonsense is that lawnmowers are so common we just don’t think about the inherent danger in their design and operation, thus we go on to stupider mishaps, whether it’s launching rocks or making YouTube videos like Shooty McMowerman in the OP.
I fully expect this guy to be No True Scotsman’d out of the ranks of the ‘responsible gun owners’ club. Pity we can only do this retroactively after bloodshed, wouldn’t it be nice if maybe some sort of safety knowledge could be instilled before this sort of bullshit? But there I go again with my pipe dreams.
A couple pounds of explosive will push metal fast enough to chop off your leg, but OK City was over 2 tonnes of explosive. That’s when the FBI gets interested.
Going on and on about tannerite, let’s examine what it is (although the precise mixture won’t be discussed. At all.
Ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer that since the Oklahoma City bombing, large sales are reported to the FBI.
Aluminum powder, common for aluminum casting and sintering aluminum objects.
The Oklahoma City bombing used ammonium nitrate and fuel oil bombs, drums full of them and no, the precise mixture won’t be discussed.
Three pounds (OK, likely well under that, as we’re talking about a mixture) of fertilizer wouldn’t raise many eye brows at the federal level.
This video would, as when mixed, he created and unregistered, unlicensed destructive weapon, in short, a bomb. He then compounded his offense by utilizing pyrotechnic devices without a pyrotechnicians license, resulting in bodily harm.
If there were inhabited structures or highways within 3 – 5 miles of where he was doing all of this stupidity, he’d also be endangering the public.
So, that’d be three felonies he’s guilty of, one only needs one to be barred from firearms ownership.
@33
and I would guess that his bomb was at least as powerful as the Boston pressure cooker bombs were.
uncle frogy
“He did something incredibly stupid, but didn’t deserve maiming.”
I disagree. Some people are so adverse to learning anything that does not fit into their flawed worldview that partial disablement is the only message that can actually get through to them.
zetopan (#35) –
It is possible to show disdain without losing basic decency.
Many years ago, one of my brother’s friends, a smoker, told about his trip to a dentist. After having a tooth removed, he was instructed NOT to suck on anything for a few days, not straws or cigarettes, because it would cause the wound to start bleeding.
One minute after he stepped outside the dentist’s office, he lit up a cancer stick, ignoring instructions not to smoke as many smokers do. One minute after that, he ran back inside begging for help. The dentist stopped the bleeding and stitched it, but showed no pity by not re-applying a topical “because there wasn’t time”. He learnt his lesson the hard way.
Do they still give out Darwin Awards? This person seems like an ideal candidate for at least an honorable mention.
Or if there had been a responsible, gun carrying lawnmower in the area to stop this lone maniac from packing the poor victim with explosives and shooting at it. Will no one think of the lawnmower!? The shooter lost a leg, but that lawnmower lost everything. Our thoughts and prayers go out to the victim and its family of garden implements.
zetopan
No, fuck, that’s shitty.
Do you also agree with cutting off the hands of repeated thieves?
It’s like saying smokers deserve lung cancer because they weren’t smart enough to stop smoking.
As I said, I don’t have much pity for him, but having your leg cut off isn’t just deserts.
Unfortunately, they will as long as there’s a market for pseudo-eugenicist “celebrate the preventable deaths of people that make bad decisions because lol stupid people deserve to die or get maimed” bullshit.
“Aw! Blew my leg off!!!!”
Well, maybe you ought not do that then.
I recommend that, given the opportunity, you won’t repeat that stupid exercise. Either that, or you will rather quickly run out of legs.
You choose. I won’t bother waiting for an answer.
I’m not saying anything, I’m over 60 and can remember when (even in GB) at home experimentation was fairly easy.
Not that there were certain compounds of iodine synthesised, or azide compounds or rust and aluminium powder intimately mixed, or aqua regia …
Because a) no one would ever think of searching wikipedia, and b) the precise ratio isn’t really that critical. 50% error in the fuel % makes little difference to an IED.
But I suppose people prepared to pay $10/lb (for a product that can be made for less than $1) just to make a bang when they shoot it, aren’t that smart
On the plus side, I believe Tannerite, as with other commercial explosives, contains chemical tracing agents which help the FBI track down the purchaser (hint: it’s the guy with one leg)