Re: Man hurt using gun to change tyre

Whiskers <catwheezel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

On 2007-11-14, Rowland McDonnell <real-address-in-sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Whiskers <catwheezel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Rowland McDonnell <real-address-in-sig@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Loz <lozzer2@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7091904.stm

`A US man has injured himself in both legs after attempting to loosen a
stiff wheel-nut by blasting it with his gun.

The 66-year-old man from Washington state was repairing his car outside
his home when the accident took place.

Shooting at the wheel from arm's length with his 12-gauge shotgun, he
was peppered with buckshot and debris.

The man - whom police say was on his own and not intoxicated - was taken
to hospital with severe, but not life-threatening, injuries.

The man, from South Kitsap, 10 miles (6km)

That's 16km ;))

Hey, I just cut-and-pasted! But you're right, of course. I do that
sort of conversion in my head a lot, 'cos I've got a metric-only
speedo/odo pair. If it were 10 km, it'd be about 6 miles; so the
mistake might have been `doing it the wrong way round' or `accidentally
missing out the 1'.

I recently read a BBC 'Ceefax' news report (on the telly) which
laboriously converted all the miles into kilometres - and got the
conversion hopelessly wrong in each case; someone had multiplied by five
and divided by eight but in the wrong direction.

Argh. Why don't people spot that kind of thing? I mean, if you saw a
bunch of mile/kilometre alleged equivalents, and the `kilometre' figure
was consistently less than the `mile' figure, it'd ring alarm bells,
yes?

southwest of Seattle, had
been repairing his Lincoln Continental for two weeks, according to the
police, and had removed all but one of the nuts on the right rear wheel.
'

The only thing wrong with this story is that the eejit concerned
*didn't* end up dead.

He's lucky he didn't hurt anyone else either

I get the idea that this sort of thing tends to happen when others are
not that close by.

Spotting a loony with a large fire-arm would be a good incentive to be
elsewhere, certainly.

At least to the extent of standing back well away from the line of fire.

- but what state is the car
in now? He won't have made the repair job any easier, that's for sure!

There's a good chance that he's just caused a bit of `just a bit worse
than cosmetic' damage to what's likely to be a good old fashioned solid
steel wheel.

But those pellets might have got into the hydraulics, the cooling system,
fuel lines, battery, all sorts of places - that car could be a disaster
waiting to happen, now.

Ish, ish. The thing is that if any pellets did manage to get into
anywhere like that, they'd've also caused a leak, and the trouble from
the leak would manifest itself probably before the car were driven.

Admittedly, given the idiocy of the bloke who looks after it and drives
it, one might guess that he'd drive off in it anyway, but there
shouldn't be any trouble. In any case, if the shot was aimed at the
wheel, well maybe some pellets could have got wedged in the brake
mechanism so the caliper needs to come off for sure, and there's a short
length of rubber hydraulic hose that could pick up a puncture - it'd
take a shotgun blast at close range to penetrate such a hose, but that's
what it got. Aside from that - well, there's not much down there that's
fragile, and riccocheting shotgun pellets do have rather less energy -
although clearly enough to injure a man quite seriously. But going
through skin is a lot easier than going through a rubber hose of the
sort you get on cars.

It took him two weeks to get *all but one wheel nut off*?

We don't know how long he was working on that particular nut (apart from
'not long enough', obviously).

The article implies that he'd been working on that wheel for a
fortnight.

Not to me; I read it as saying that he'd been working on the car for two
weeks, not just that wheel.

You could well be right.

If he'd been trying to loosen one nut for two
weeks then his sanity is clearly in question;

The fact that he tried to loosen a nut using a shotgun is enough to pour
doubts on his sanity if you ask me.

if it's seized that badly a
drill or 'bolt cutters' would be the obvious recourse.

It's a rare nut that can't be shifted with heat and enough torque. Big
levers, that's what you need. If it's seriously stiff, a seriously big
lever.

I once helped a friend bend a subframe on his Opel Manta back into shape
after he'd rolled the heap. IIRC, the lever was an 8' length of 6"
steel steam main with an angle iron fork brazed to the end ('cos he
could braze but not weld) that slotted neatly onto the frame members.

I made a mental note to avoid catching lifts with him until he'd
replaced that car. The fact that he walked away from every accident he
had didn't detract from the fact that he crashed a lot (he only did me
once - it wasn't actually /very/ much his fault at all for once (diesel
on a wet road, mostly) - and I landed on him so that was okay), and I
don't want to think what state the subframe was in after all that
wrenching about.

Even if that does
mean the 'hub' has to be replaced too.

Parts like that tend to be cheap from the breaker's yard.
Aforementioned crash-a-lot friend had a VW Golf once. A wheel dropped
off one day - bearing failure, chewed through the half-shaft, doing
90mph up the M40 out of London one morning. The wheel bounced over the
other side of the carriageway and did tens of thousands of pounds worth
of damage to a whole line of very expensive cars. The actual wheel and
tyre were fine and were recovered and put back on the car.

The Golf was repaired after spending something like £40 at the breakers
- two parts, ISTR. Mid 1980s prices.

No brains, no sense, not safe to be left outside on his own, ought to be
taken into care unless the sensible thing is done and he's put somewhere
he can kill himself without harming others.

Ye gods. I'm crap, almost completely useless at doing things, but if
you show me a wheel, I can get the wheel nuts off *now*. Okay, maybe
it'll take an hour or so if I have trouble (Plus Gas needs to soak in
for best effect) - but they're coming off. And guns do nothing but
damage.

Something needs to be done about the madness of the US version of the
NRA. The US gives a consitutional right for its citizens to bear arms
for the purposes of maintaining an armed militia. Well, that's all
about maintaining a defensive military force without maintaining a
standing army - the situation has changed, the USA maintains a standing
army, and the `right to bear arms' as defined in the US constitution is
obsolete and ought to be scrapped.

Yes, but all the pro-gun types will have to run out of ammo before their
sane neighbours have a chance of getting the guns off them.

Umm. Well, yes, but that's not hard to arrange for, surely? I mean,
the US army and so on do outgun the population by a factor of `nukes,
stealth bombers, cruise missiles' and so on.

I suspect that the people in the armed services are by and large 'pro gun'
so they won't act.

That's why they have to follow orders: it's not up to the armed forces.

Getting paid to use guns seems to be one of the
attractions of the military.

That's part of it - but a lot of the attraction is in the fact that it's
not a 9-5 job (unless you're in the RAF) and you don't have any of the
worries that civvies have in running their lives. Your job's secure,
you're given somewhere to live, food on the table provided, all bills
taken care of (they take it straight from your pay), and so on.

Owning and
using firearms has become a religion in the USA.

<grin> Well, they've not had their big messy religious war just yet -
maybe now is the time?

As long as they keep it to themselves.

I suppose that's the problem, innit? Thing is, the only other nation
that's as mad on gun ownership as the USA is Switzerland, and you can be
very sure they won't get involved in anyone else's war, unless it's as
mercenaries.

[snip]

Weapons can be used in offence (incuding 'pre-emptive offence' which is as
close as it's possible to get to a defensive use) or for
revenge/retaliation/escalation.

And there are people in a position to need that sort of thing -
politicians in N.I., for example; or my auntie Betty when her husband
had been posted to dodgy places with such inadequate security that it
was quite likely that she'd wake up to find armed robbers in the house.
Well, she'd been in the army herself and had the training, so it's not
so bad in that case.

A hand-gun is no use against petrol through the letter-box or bricks
through the window or nasty stuff delivered by post or wedged into the
under-pinnings of a car or boat.

Very true; they had all sorts of security measures in place. The
handguns for personal protection were very much the last line of - well,
defence, I think I have to call it.

Those people were in the firing line precisely because the use of violence
had already been resorted to by all sides.

Yup. No arguments from me about that point.

That is what should and could
have been averted, right back in the 1960s.

Yup squared.

The troubles were not resolved by violence or weapons, they were resolved
(in so far as they have been) by people very carefully /not/ being violent,
but talking instead.

Cubed. But still: while the troubles were still on, and never mind how
come it all got started and carried on and all that, there were people
who did have a use for guns by way of personal protection.

I suspect that the guns operated mostly as a deterrent - if you know the
bugger's got a gun, you'll probably be a bit wary about doing some
things. Or course, that just means that any attacks will be either very
sneaky and clever, or really stupid and bound to fail. Still, I suspect
that they might have done some good even if none of them were ever used.
I suspect that they might never have been used in any case.

[snip]

Not attracting violence in the first place, is the best form of defence; a
poor second takes the form of armour and fortifications.

Armour is third place: second place is running like hell.

I don't think running is an option that can be relied on even for those
physically capable of it.

Relied on, no, not particularly. But if the first lines of `trouble
avoidance' have failed, running's a bloody good thing to try next.

I have been known to talk myself out of 'a
situation' but that can't really be depended on either.

Very true - but again, it's always worth a shot.

I recall hearing Ray Rearden (IIRC; the snooker player) talking about
when he was a special constable and came across some bloke with a gun.
He approached the armed chap wearing a smile, and said something along
the lines of `It's a lovely day mate, you don't want to be walking
around with a gun, here, let me take it' and - well, got handed the gun.

I've managed to bring people down from an `I'm about to smack you one'
state by smiling at them and speaking in a friendly fashion.

But if you're faced with an armed nutter, nothing can be relied on to
get you out of it - the best thing is simply to not be there. I've
generally managed that much. But if that fails - well, you just try
everything else that you can think of, and in my case, violence is not
on the cards. I just don't know how to do it. But I do know how to
talk and I can usually turn up the charm - threatening people tend to
get a bit nonplussed when faced with a smiling, charming person being
nice to them. Okay, there's a certain sort of threatening person who'd
just smack you between the eyes if you tried that on them, but I like to
think that I'd have enough judgement to just stay a long way away from
that sort; I certainly try to, any time I spot 'em. I've been known to
leave the building, put it like that.

Rowland.

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