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Potato Bazookas
Zog The Undeniable writes "The latest craze in Germany is "Kartoffelkanone" or potato bazookas. These use hairspray ignited by a spark to fire potatoes at colossal speeds. The authorities are not amused." Everyone needs a hobby I guess.
A couple dozen kids playing with the things is simply annoying. When you get thousands, the statistics start to catch up with you.
When they start being 'in', the nature of the problem also shifts. You start to leave the domain of 'geeks playing with tech' and get into the realm of 'jocks playing with weapons'. It's a completly different mindset -- one with far less interest in (or even knowledge of) safety.issues.
A geek firing a cement-filled cannister at a brick wall is one thing. A jock firing a cement-filled cannister at his favorite geek target is another. The first death from one of these things is not going to be pretty.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
I don't which is scarier the joke you are making (?), that you are trying to make a joke, or that the joke may not be a joke at all.
Nice use of stereotypes. Your basic point about the popularity of spud guns being the problem is valid, but the whole "geeks" and "jocks" thing is irrelevant. There are plenty of examples of kids who could be classified as jocks playing with tech toys, and as Columbine showed there are plenty of examples of those sometimes labelled as "geeks" playing with conventional weapons.
And I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners.
Berke Breathed
How is this news anyways? Back in Georgia my redneck uncle showed me the potato gun he built. I know several people who have built and used potato guns for a long time.
Occam's razor is the blind faith in the natural selection of least resistance and in universal oversimplification. -- EF
Despite the "We Are The World" mentality, what the Treasury Department in the States considers a weapon has no bearing on GERMANY and its citizens.
"I'm not impatient. I just hate waiting." - My Dad
More precisely, this article: Durchschlagende Wucht.
;-)
At the bottom there also is a link to the corresponding Spiegel TV video. It's called Die Rückkehr der Kartoffelkanone (Return of the potato gun / cannon), so that indicates already that this kind of weapon isn't exactly new. But that shall not keep everyone here from making fun of Germans!
I just think it's interesting that the blunderbuss has been reinvented. But the fact that they're aiming them at people is real bad, I think.
That said, you are seeing the true meaning of the American 2nd Amendment: each amendment prohibits the government from trying to do something that is highly stupid, because it can't.
Governments that try to violate those principles get away with it for a time -- but either they learn, or they fall, or the country fails.
In the case of the 2nd Amendment, you can't prevent people from defending themselves; and arming themselves is part of that.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Ahh please. people in rural america have been doing this for as long as there hav been potatoes lying around an not being stewed. When I was working on a pipeline job this summer in Alaska, the welders and I had a plot to weld a chamber 12 inch 40 wall steel pipe and use compressed oxygen and sedeline (EXTREMELY explosive) to shoot rubber-sealed foam pipeline pigs _miles_ accross the wilderness.
I can't beleive ze germans are actually injuring people.
-P