SEKIU, Wash. - A woman said she was shot in the leg by her stove. Cory Davis told the Peninsula Daily News she had just stoked her cast-iron heating stove Sunday when she heard a loud bang and was struck in her left calf.
Davis said a case of shotgun shells spilled about a month ago at her home and one must have landed in the newspapers she used to light the stove.
Uhhhhh. No.
Your stove didn't shoot you in the leg, lady. Being a lazy idiot who has no business owning a waffle iron, let alone a firearm, put you in a position where your own carelessness caused harm to yourself. (Assuming, of course, that the account is correct; this could easily be a drunken ND that she's trying to cover up...)
How the bloody hell do you not realize that you are loading a shotgun shell into your stove? I mean, even a .410 shell is pretty darn big; one would think that the fact that the paper weighed about treble what it should might have sounded some warning bells... But then again, I don't make a habit of storing my ammunition directly over my combustibles, so what the hell do I know?
Friggin' people. Sometimes I fear for the human race. The rest of the time, I buy more ammo...
Side note: Please note the new Post Label of "Striking Stupidity". I cannot believe it's taken me this long to create this category...
That is all.
6 comments:
Don't you crumple up the newspapers a bit to light them? A flat pile never burns well in mine.
Maybe that's why she added the shell, to ignite the newspapers!
Ever see a shot gun shell in a fire?
It just burns REALLY quickly, & the plastic hull gets pretty zippy, but the shot, being heavier, doesn't really go anywhere except for some general scattering about.
Paul has done demonstrations for the local FD, who were a little wary about entering a burning GUN SHOP FULL OF AMMO. Even brass cartridges just make a futzing pop, & the case becomes the "projectile".
I think ND here...
What DT said. If there's no chamber and barrel to contain the propellant gases there's no force behind the projectile.
Also, I'm sitting in front of my new cast iron fireplace insert as we speak. This thing's a tank. I could toss a m-80 in there and as long as I get the door closed in time, I'd be pretty safe from any resultant explosion.
knitalot3,
I dunno. I usually just dose my wood in Coleman's Fuel before I start the fire... ;)
DT,
I've heard that, but never seen an actual demonstration. It makes sense - without the chamber to contain the charge, there's nothing to direct the energy.
Bruce,
"I could toss a m-80 in there and as long as I get the door closed in time, I'd be pretty safe from any resultant explosion."
There's some famous last words right there...
"Hey, y'all hold my beer and watch this shit!"
Wow.
There's a whole chapter in Hatcher's Notebook where they try every way possible to touch off cartridges of every description, and other than a bit of shrapnel nothing much happened. Fire, shooting a box of cartridges, touching off the primer with an arc-welder...for that last one, they covered the apparatus with a cardboard box, and nothing from a .32, a .45, or a 12-gauge even nicked the cardboard. There was a small dent from some .30-06 shrapnel.
Reminds me of the urban legend Darwin Award about the hicks that supposedly got shot in the family jewels after replacing a fuse in their pickup truck with a .22.
I second bunnyman's mention of Hatcher's notebook. It's a great read for any gunny, in part because it dispels a lot of myths like this. My father, an avid cartridge collector, reloader, and silouhette shooter entertained my brother and I one long, dull afternoon by mimicing one of the experiments described in it:
He took several rounds of different caliber ammunition (ranging in power from .22lr to .30-06, and a mix of pistol and rifle ammo) and put them, primer down, on a hot plate. He then put a cardboard box over them and plugged the hotplate in. After a couple of minutes we heard some fizzing, one pop, and then nothing. Net result: zero damage to the cardboard box, and a whole lot of swollen, split, distorted cases and all the bullets accounted for and lying loose on or near the hotplate.
Sycophantic P.S: Love the blog, Jay, keep up the awesome work.
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