Why didn't they just pull the pin and throw it while at the range, why waste other explosives on it? What a panic over a grenade that has been lying around harmlessly since the war. Bunch of wussies. I would have taken the damn thing out into the woods and thrown it without telling the cops about it. Telling the cops leaves you wide open to some stupid charge you never heard of.
“I would have taken the damn thing out into the woods and thrown it without telling the cops about it. Telling the cops leaves you wide open to some stupid charge you never heard of.”
If that thing blows up a spotted owl in the woods, you better hope nobody hears it or you could be in BIG trouble!;)
My roommate in school had one of those things. He used to call the plebes into our room and he would sit at his desk, the plebe standing at attention, and fiddle with the thing while talking about this and that. He would then “accidently” release the pin and let the handle fly off. Those poor kids would nearly jump out of their skins.
Why didn’t they just pull the pin and throw it while at the range, why waste other explosives on it?
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Probably because they don’t want to be the stars in the next “EOD Gone Bad” training film.
Seriously, why take a chance? It’s easy to sit here and laugh but the funeral and looking at the man’s children and wife are not funny. I have attended one. It’s not nice to clean up either.
Treat everything the same and you probably go home at the end of a shift. Get careless and you may not. Most grenades are very stable but the old striker fired ones relied on springs that routinely fail (see springs on an all original WWII era Thompson for comparison) and the timed fuze was sometimes a risky proposition even in WWII. Some of them have also been “remanufactured” by people who don’t know what they are doing.
They stopped using live grenades in training for a short time prior to the U.S. entering WWII due to several training deaths where the soldiers pulled the pins and the grenade exploded within a second of being thrown. This led to the creation of the blue capped training grenades.
It’s easy to poke fun when you watch the process but one moment of carelessness can cause lots of hurt to many people. If you don’t care about the cop at least consider what it costs the taxpayers when their bomb tech gets blown up or a bystander gets killed or wounded because they did not set a safe perimeter.
Why take a chance?
If they tossed it at the range and it SEEMED to be a dud... would you want to walk over and try it a second time???