'Safety bullet' invention aims to prevent accidental shootings

News Herald ^ | Story filed: 11:52 Tuesday 30th July 2002 | Editorial Staff

[vannrox]

'Safety bullet' invention aims to prevent accidental shootings

A Florida man claims to have designed a safety bullet which locks up a gun when it's accidentally fired.

Mike Worley says his simple invention takes gun safety to another level.

He came up with the idea after a local boy was shot in his elbow while showing off his dad's .357 Magnum.

The safety bullet can be hidden in the gun chamber and ejected quickly if the owner needs to fire a live bullet.

If the safety bullet is fired, it jams the chamber and locks the gun until the shell is removed with a special tool.

The News Herald reports Mr Worley has applied for a patent for his invention.

He says several companies are interested in his design, and one has started making a prototype.

Mr Worley, from Panama City, says he supports the use of guns and understands why people need a loaded gun as protection.

He said: "I think the safety bullet is a step in the right direction. I don't want fame and fortune. This is a simple device that takes safety to the next level."

Story filed: 11:52 Tuesday 30th July 2002

[Freemeorkillme]

He must've heard Bugs Bunny singing that song the 2x4 song. Hate those "insensitive" cartoons.

[lavaroise]

If the safety bullet is fired, it jams the chamber and locks the gun until the shell is removed with a special tool.

Dude, just do notput a bullet in the Chamber. These people want your gun to jam when you try to grab it from the wife's purse when under attack. It's ridiculous. A special tool to remove the bullet? AAAAAAAAAH what the hell is this interference? I do not need a bullet to tell me what to do, sorry. I tell the bullet what to do. This is bull antigun trojan horse.

[lavaroise]

Well, yeah, basic gun education helps, but try telling that to some pusbag governor like Parris Glendening.

I am afraid this useless device makes it more complicated and more dangerous to handle firearms.

[Shooter 2.5]

Here's a picture of Finn [in the sweater] talking to Col. Bob Young, Cooper's next door neighbor at the house party at the end of the week. What I should do is start scanning some of the older pictures I have and start using them. When I go to the NRA conventions I bring books to be signed and a camera. It's invaluable.

[Shooter 2.5]

Ok, this story won't beat your's.
I was a bachelor party and this drunk, well, one of the drunks anyway, pulled a knife on me but we were on opposite sides of a table.

I pulled out a PEZ dispensor.

The drunk said, "What the hell is that?
I said, "It's a PEZ dispensor. Do you want one?"
He said, "Sure".
I gave him one of the candies, and that was the end of the little disagreement.

[Abundy]

SBI - Aside from being a former police officer, I'm an attorney. I'm also a martial arts instructor. I've seen your discussions about your attorney and liability stemming from the use of this product. You ought to take him some of the comments on this thread - as he hasn't thought any of the liability through. The average person will die using your product. So will trained individuals. For support I offer a personal experience, and the lessons you can learn from it. Read on.

While I was in law school I worked as a doorman at a local nightclub with some other BB's from my school. One night a drunken girl who was pissed at her boyfriend (he was a bar back IIRC) got barred by the manager. She got into a screaming match with him at the rear entrance and came at him with a pocket knife. We were all standing in a triangle with her to my left and the manager to my right - each about 3 feet apart. There was a wooden privacy fence to my rear about 1 foot behind me, the path we were standing on was about 3 feet across and on the other side was some shrubbery...it was a tight area with little room to manuever. One second she was yelling, the next second she had a knife...the next second she was face first against the fence and I had her in a control hold. (left arm up behind her back and her right hand pinned against the fence)

The manager was as surprised as the girl and I were. He said one second she was coming at him and the next she wasn't there. After we disarmed her and sent her on her way I had some time to think. She came past me and I was able to grab her knife hand and use her momentum to swing her around into the fence. (and get her other hand in a modified chicken wing) I didn't remember doing any of this and it wasn't a conscious thought of what techniques to use, either. It was only after things calmed down that I could replay the event in my mind's eye.

The moral is that the manager would have been headed to the hospital with multiple stab wounds had I not been there - and had I not been studying martial arts for the previous 12 years which allowed my training to override and control my reactions. The reaction time for the average person at three feet would be too slow to process the event to prevent the first or second blow.

What does this have to do with your product? I was keyed up and alert for problems - but never really expected her to attack this guy, let alone use an edged weapon. It took twelve years of training to develop an unconscious response on my part that was appropriate to the situation and overrode the natural "fight or flight" reaction. How will an untrained person react? How will a trained person react if not prepared mentally for a confrontation. Further, you want people to place a product in their personal defense weapon that will render said weapon inoperable if the trigger is depressed before racking the slide twice. This requires an individual under the stress of an armed confrontation to override the natural impulse to squeeze the trigger as soon as possible. You want this individual who is under extreme stress to remember to do something unthinkable in the face of an armed assailant: unload their weapon twice! That's right. You want them to rack the slide twice - and action associated in the brain with unloading a weapon. (What do you do to make sure a semi-auto is unloaded? You rack the slide 3 or 4 times.) The basic premise(s) of your product are flawed. Period.

Even given my firearms and other training, I am not putting anything in my firearms that renders them inoperable if I mess up. At 000darkhundred I'm going to be groggy and not at 100%. If confronted with an armed attacker I'm going to aim and fire as trained...I won't be thinking about racking the slide twice. I've had training that the average person has not. I am not comfortable trusting to that training in the middle of the night - hell it would take years to re-train me to rack the slide twice before firing. If I'm not comfortable, why should you or anyone else think that the average person will be?

Further, every gun is a loaded gun until I determine it isn't. If I don't see that the slide is locked open than the gun is loaded. That's been drilled into me since I was old enough to understand the concept. At 000darkhundred when I need my firearm and I see it sitting there without a trigger lock or a bright cable through the barrel my mind is going to register a firearm in battery and ready to fire...and this product will only get me and mine killed.

If serious, trained individuals have issues with the product and the basic concept behind it, than you better damn well take notice - because like smart guns, the average moron that doesn't know d#ck about firearms will think this product removes all the safety issues and wind up getting someone killed by relying on it. Yeah, that's right. Smart Guns. Another moronic idea. I was present for the testimony for and against MD's assinine bill. The representative from Berretta testified that their market research showed an untapped market that would increase their sales by half of their current volume - and they were ignoring it because their market research showed that approximately 95% of this untapped market had one thing in common - they didn't own firearms and didn't have any safety training. It also showed that these people believed that a smart gun was foolproof and did not need to worry about leaving it lying around loaded. Berretta testified that they could not sell firearms to such a market and pleaded with the committee not to pass the bill as it would cause more deaths than it would save.

So will your product.

Thus endeth the sermon.

[Flyer]

Thus endeth the sermon.

Touchdown! Game over.

[Crowcreek]

'Hahahaha! *I'm* a wife, and I would "explain" it in pretty much the same terms. :oD))'

Of course you would -- That's one reason your husband is glad he's married to you!

[TJFLSTRAT]

This has to be a collasal joke, what a useless, idiotic notion. { a special tool , blah, blah, blah}. CASE CLOSED!

[TJFLSTRAT]

Now for reality. Homeowner knows he is danger, picks up his "gimmic" piece, forgets about the safety bullet, pulls trigger, now he must get the device to clear the weapon for a "real" cartridge, get flustered, tosses silly "gimmic" weapon, reaches behind his headbord for his fully loaded , non "gimmic" weapon and defends himself, and his family. Oh by the way, H & k makes a 9mm {p7m8} which has a front strap that must be squeezed with apx. 9 lbs. of force to make the weapon ready for firing. This is a great way to prevent small children from firing this piece. Older teens will easily defeat safety bullet-inventors "gimmic" piece.

[Crowcreek]

I've always longed for a perfectly safe way to allow all the neighborhood kids to play with my guns, and thanks to your ingenious concept, now I can !!

These d*mn kids1 They're running all over the house, shooting pencils into the ceiling! They drop a pencil down the bore over the squib load - er, 'safe-T bullhit, then point it up and 'pop' - another hole in my drywall!

I'm losing it fast; I'm breaking out the real AMMO !

[absalom01]

Mr. Worley:

You say: "Now go to Yahoo type in Accidental Shooting and start reading some of the 60,000 stories of people taht were involved in an accidental shooting and you tell me would it have saved any of those lives. "

OK, let's look at YaHOO!, with the suggested search term 'accidental shooting'.

I've snipped the first few paragraphs from a random group on the first results page, and then asked myself
Would this (the Safety Bullet) have saved this life?

Case 1: "The victim's husband stated that he was cleaning his gun when it accidentally discharged and shot his wife in the face..."

Yup (unless this was not a real accident)

Case 2: "He said two boys, who are cousins, were hunting rabbits. Alexander said a snake appeared and the 16-year-old boy shot it. The bullet ricocheted and hit the 14-year-old in a shoulder, he said...."

Nope

Case 3: "Officer Haffner worked the 2:30 p.m.-11 p.m. South patrol shift Thursday. After work, he drove to his Smyrna home. As Officer Haffner and his wife talked in the kitchen, he began taking off his police gear. While doing so, he removed his police department-issued .40 caliber semi-automatic pistol from its holster and placed it on the kitchen table. As he continued taking off his equipment, the couple’s three-year-old son picked up the pistol and it fired once..."

OK, could have saved this young office if he had been willing to load his duty weapon with these things, but that's not the intended market, right? Let's chalk this up as a 'Nope'

Case 4: "IT STARTED as an impromptu lecture on safety and responsibility from an off-duty police officer picking up her son at a Germantown charter school. It ended with a 10-year-old boy being rushed to the hospital when the officer, after passing her unloaded gun around the classroom, dropped the weapon as she was reloading [for crying out loud! AB] it and it went off...."

Nope

In only one of these cases would your invention have saved a life. Now, that's not a scientific survey, granted, but it does not look promising for the safety bullet.

The point is, some lives surely would be saved by using your invention, but it seems likely that many more will be lost through its use, with the possible exception of requiring on-duty LEO's to load their duty weapons with this thing ('course, that won't go over too big). This is not an attack, but a request for better or more information. Have you done some number crunching on the life saved/lost CBA? That would be both interesting, and topical. Doesn't solve the political problems that many have with the idea, but that can be separately addressed.

[Constitution Day]

"Hillbilly Hare" is probably the greatest Bugs Bunny cartoon.

Top 5, anyway.

[SafetyBullet-Inventor]

Thank you for taking the time to educate me. I still believe there is a market for this. With any luck I can persuade some to take a firearms safety course and go to a gun range and get to know their weapon.

It is not for all people and all situations, nothing is. One of the things that urged me on are the # of experts that when I stated working on this told me it was a good thing. They all urged me on.

It has its weakneses but I don;t know of a device made that is perfect for every occasion. My thinking was that it would make guns safer.

I have done a lot of research on Homes that have a loaded gun and kids.The studies are all over the internet. With 1.4 million homes haveing loaded guns that have no safety devices on them and 40% of them have kids!! I think we can all agree that that is an accident waiting to happen.

One of the points that a lot of people have talked about is the intruder in the middle of the night. OK when the firearm is next to your person why not take the SB out but if you store it or are not near it load one in. IF you have kids and no other safety device around this would be an improvement

The device to disable the SB after its been fired looks just like the cleaning rod that you use to clean you gun with and it forces the locking pin back inside the SB and it releaves the pressure on the plastic that was forced inside the chamber. So far it has not taken any more time to disable the safety bullet when it was fired than it would to unlock any other safety device.

This is not for adults this is for kids. Any kid that finds their parents gun and pulls the trigger, the gun locks up and no new lethal round can be inserted.

You and I know the rules but thousands of people don't. So whats the answer? If we don;t find one some will find one for us. They won;t be able to take away the guns but they will try to do something like make it manditory to have gun locks on our guns all the time.

Do me a favor and come up with something you think is better than this. That allows almost instant acces to your gun and yet a level of protection. I'll tell you how to patent it youself and then I can sit back and blast it to hell. :)

Thanks again for the feedback its exactly what I need

Mike Worley Safety bullet inventor

see the guy bitching about my spelling hell he should see the way I dress!

[Shooter 2.5]

Just posting "Hillbilly Hare" made this thread worthwhile.

[SafetyBullet-Inventor]

The NTSB gave a screwdriver, hammer and a pair of plyers to a group of teenagers and told them to disable some 20 seperate gun locks. The longest it took them was three minutes. The only thing I know that is 100% is to weld the trigger to the gun

Mike Worley Inventor of the Safety Bullet

[SafetyBullet-Inventor]

You have not said one positive thing about this from the getgo.

OK smart boy whats the answer. WHat special tool or device would make a gun safe that will stop non authorized people from using your gun yet make it readily available in a second?

Lets see it!

Mike Worley Inventor of the Safety Bullet

[Constitution Day]

I'm going to bed, but I need to post the link where I found that.
Did you know that parts of the original cartoon have been censored?

Typical.

CD

[Shooter 2.5]

I'm trying to download the cartoon now but it doesn't look like it's available.
Thanks.

[SafetyBullet-Inventor]

The first storey that I read that really made me sick to my stomach was of a 4 year old that got his grandfathers handgun and killed his 6 year old sister with it. Yea the grandfather was an expert to.

I hope you never have to face that. It was not even my kid but it caused me to try and do something about it. What have you done to better the firearm owners of the world. Its easy to sit on the side lines and bitch about something. Impress me - do something other than bitch about the world.

Mike Worley Inventor of the Safey Bullet