I couldn’t find a link that didn’t require registration, but here’s a clip from the Denton [TX] Record Chronicle:
**A Denton teen is in critical condition after being shot in the face with a frog exploding from a potato gun, and his mother wants to know why the illegal weapons are available on the Internet.
Daniel Benjamin Berry, 17, was taken to John Peter Smith Hospital in Fort Worth early Sunday after he looked down the PVC pipe barrel and was struck in the face by a frog.
“He is going to be blind in both eyes,” said his mother, Lisa Berry, from her vigil in the critical care waiting room. “Some other kid ordered one [potato gun] over the Internet. They thought it was a toy. It’s not a toy. It’s a dangerous weapon.” **
Sometimes the karma train runs right the fuck over you.
What’s the problem here? This is the problem. Now that he’s blind, he won’t be able to look down the barrel of a real gun, like he should’ve the first time. Stupid fucking kid.
Just to elaborate, some kids were having some trouble with the 'tator gun, and he went over to help them. He wasn’t the person that purchased the gun, nor did he put the frog in it.
Kind of. It’s a length of tube (pvc, I think, is popular) with one end sealed, and an opening to allow access, with an igniter mounted inside.
Anyway, you shove the potato (or frog, evidently) down in the barrel (make sure it’s snug), open the ‘breech’, spray in something flammable, close it up, and ignite (a friend of mine had one with one of those spark lighters from a gas grill in it).
Fingolfin, a potato gun is kind of a primitive cannon designed to shoot, well, potatoes. I’ve never heard of anyone buying one, as they’re pretty easy to make. I suspect that the gun itself was not purchased on the 'net, but rather the plans and instructions for it.
A potato gun is muzzle-loaded, like an old musket or Renaissance cannon. You can shove anything you want down there, as long as it’s around the right size, and it’ll serve as ammo. Potatoes are popular because they’re about the right size, fairly dense & massive, tough enough to not disintegrate on launch, and real cheap.
A seventeen-year-old who doesn’t know better than to look down the barrel of a piece of artillery with a ~6" bore that can shoot a potato several hundred feet, while it’s cocked and loaded, is well on his way to finding plenty of clever ways to get himself killed, IMO.
I’m more concerned, personally, with the state of mind the kids were in that made them think it was funny to load animals instead of vegetables in the thing …
I use hair spray and can launch a tuber a good 200 yards. Still, the whole premise is that the tight fit of the projectile allows the compression to build. They must have wedged the damn frog in to get it to exit that fast.