Paintball Deaths Can Be Avoided
Tuesday, July 3rd, 2007Paintball is frequently demonized as a sport that promotes violence through the use of gear and tactics that represents violent acts. Over the past decade, much has been done to turn that image around, to help people realize that it can be a true sport.
Once in a while, though, there are incidents that bolster the sentiments that speak the darker tale. Generally these are true accidents, often from lack of safety, or knowledge. One example is in the video below. In this case we have a kid looking over his paintball marker to determine whether or not it is jammed. Notice that he is wearing NO safety equipment (goggles), there is no barrel bag and the marker is not on safe. Given the same circumstances, and let’s assume this were a traditional firearm, would one look down the barrel to evaluate the situation?
In another incident, a woman was struck by a CO2 bottle as it was being removed from the paintball marker. This has become a widely known problem, but to those that are unfamiliar it can be quite dangerous when a player unscrews the bottle from the marker, but doesn’t realize that the bottle is being removed from the valve, rather than the bottom line. This creates an uncontrolled circumstance where all of the liquid CO2 in the bottle is suddenly exposed to the warmer air, and the bottle becomes a missile. This is now prevented by putting a mark across the bottle and the valve. Doing so will allow the user to see if the mark separates while unscrewing it from the bottom line.
In most cases only common sense is needed. Then if sense were truly common, more people would have it. That being said, just be smart, or try to be, about how you use your equipment.