I find the expression “it’s a shame” a bit odd in this context - as though it’s beyond anyone’s control.
'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens - Wikipedia
If you see it coming, go stand behind the moose.
And let’s not forget Maine’s law which makes it more difficult to remove weapons from military veterans suffering mental health issues.
America’s social safety net is scratch off lottery cards and guns.
One of my favorites.
Written in 2016 and sadly as true as ever.
Moderating:
While i don’t expect a lot more news on this topic, this is still a breaking news thread. If you’d like to discuss whether America has too many guns, or gun laws that are too lax, i encourage you to start a new thread for it. Again, feel free to link to this one.
It turns out he was an instructor of sorts in the army:
Publicly, the Army has said almost nothing about Mr. Card’s time in uniform — only that he was trained as a petroleum supply specialist and never deployed to combat. But soldiers who spoke to The New York Times said that description left out something crucial: Mr. Card worked every summer for years as an instructor at an Army hand grenade training range, where he was rocked by thousands of brain-jarring explosions….
One senior member of the platoon who worked with Mr. Card for years, and asked not to be named because the Army told soldiers not to speak to the media about him, said that as an instructor, Mr. Card worked with grenade launchers, AT4 anti-tank weapons and machine guns, but spent the vast majority of his time on the hand grenade range.
Wow. That’s scary.
It is not unusual for the military to tell soldiers not to talk. When I was in Korea there was a serious incident up at the DMZ when North Korean soldiers killed two American officers leading a work party to cut down some trees. It was close to my time to return, and when I made an arranged MARS call I was told, before the call was put through, that if anyone asked about it I was to say everything was fine.
Paywall so I can’t read that. A couple of things for non-military people. I have run many ranges for many different weapons systems. I’ve been Officer in Charge (OIC), Non Commissioned Officer in Charge (NCOIC), Range Safety Officer (RSO) and as a range safety. Most of those positions involve taking a short course on safety and conduct of the range. None of them require you to be an expert or even good at shooting or deploying the weapon. It’s all about how to run the range safely not teaching anyone to be an expert. Anyone in the army with any time or rank has helped run ranges. This doesn’t mean he was a highly trained killer. He had experience keeping soldiers from killing themselves accidentally while on a range.
As for blast exposure, with hand grenades? You are behind blast walls or in a hole. You don’t even feel a blast. The one thing everyone thinks the first time they see a handgrenade go off is how unimpressive the blast is. There’s a little pop and a puff of smoke. The damage comes from schrapnel that covers a small area. People are expecting a Hollywood grenade explosion. That doesn’t happen. I got to play with C4 a lot. That’s much bigger than a grenade explosion but still not impressive by Hollywood standards until you start putting together really big charges.
Here’s a video of a live grenade range. The set up with the concrete wall is pretty standard. The blast is enough to shake an exposed go-pro but you don’t even feel it behind the concrete. To call it brain jarring is not accurate.
What’s the whistling sound when he throws the grenade? You can really hear it for the 4-5 throws starting at the 0:50 mark.
With that setup, I can’t help but think of the “classic” situation where the grenade thrower (person) fumbles and the grenade drops inside the enclosure. What’s the procedure then? I would think the instructor would run with the pupil, instead of the instructor scrambling for the grenade for a re-throw.
Were I a live grenade throwing instructor, I would most definitely run the fumble scenario in my mind foremost.
Those are inert practice grenades. They are hallow. You can insert a little firecracker device in them to simulate when they go off. They whistle because of the hole in the bottom.
Ah, got it, so those are the ones you use until the instructor is sure you’ve gotten past the “Throw the pin, drop the grenade” mistake?
Are the explosions starting at 1:20 actual live grenades?
Foxholes are typically built with a grenade pit to the front to kick the thing into before it cooks off-looks like there isn’t an analogous structure in the thowing pit in the video.
From the article:
Each summer, all 1,200 West Point cadets have to throw at least one M67 grenade. Most throw two. Mr. Card was nearly always one of the instructors with the cadets in the grenade pits. The soldiers from his unit said he could easily have been exposed to more than 10,000 blasts in all….
Researchers have found a unique pattern of damage in the brains of a number of deceased veterans who were exposed to blasts, but there is no way to detect that damage in living troops. And even if it could be detected, there is no way to predict when the damage might cause a psychiatric disorder, or who might be prone to violence.
Even though so much remains unknown, members of Mr. Card’s platoon said they were concerned that simple steps were not being taken to protect soldiers from blasts.…
Years before Mr. Card became delusional, the Army had indications that grenade ranges were taking a toll on soldiers. In 2015, an Army research team went to the grenade range at Fort Jackson, S.C., after instructors there complained of headaches, fatigue, memory issues and confusion. In 2017, the Army investigated again after receiving more complaints from instructors at Fort Moore, Ga.
“They had instructors who would leave the range, have to stop their car on the side of the road and throw up,” said Gary Kamimori, a retired Army researcher involved in both studies. “They had all the symptoms of concussion.”