I’m an ls -alh guy, myself.

I’ve always read “don’t let your out or they will commit ethnic cleansing on your neighborhood fauna” as similar to “treat all firearms as if they are loaded”. While it is obviously situational (some cats don’t hunt/hunt well, obviously some guns aren’t loaded), the consequences of getting it wrong are pretty bad.

I took the time to watch some videos of people testing this.

• A pneumatic roofing nailer couldn’t stick a nail into the board from even 2-3cm away.
• A pneumatic framing nailer couldn’t stick a nail into a pine board from 5m; the nails all tumbled badly past about 15cm.
• This guy then proceeded to weld a freakin’ barrel, almost a meter long, onto his framing nailer in hopes of improving accuracy. While it did achieve that goal, he only got about 1cm of penetration from ~3m.
• A PA nailer with green blanks stuck a 1.5" nail into a railroad tie about an inch deep from 2m, and a 2.5" nail about 1cm deep from 3m.
• More interestingly, the above nailer only got about 5cm of penetration in a ballistic gel block with a 1.5" nail and a green blank from 15cm away. A yellow blank from the same distance got about 12cm of penetration.

Aside from all that, we’re talking about a tool designed to push a fastener into material while in contact with said material. A gun is a tool designed to push a bullet into a target at a distance with some level of designed-in accuracy. These are not the same thing. A power nailer can certainly be used as a gun, but it can also be used as a step stool, a ruler, or a door stop. Usage outside intended purpose doesn’t change the nature of an object.

Hey, if you want to call your PA nailer a nail gun, that’s fine. There’s no law requiring accuracy in speech, and of the entire power hammer category a PA nailer is probably closest.

Ramsets use .22 blanks, not bullets, and would have the same issues being used as a pistol at range as any other powered hammer. Even if you override the safety, and either modify or practice with it enough to be reasonably accurate, you’re just not going to do much damage if you’re more than an arm’s length or two away.

Nails have terrible ballistic performance, and there’s nothing in a nailer meant to keep the nail going straight for more than 10cm or so. A nail launched into air (rather than a hard surface) from a nailer would start to tumble almost immediately.

You’d literally be more effective throwing the nailer at an attacker than trying to shoot them with it.

To be fair on this one, based on actual functionality ‘air nailer’ or ‘power hammer’ is more accurate than ‘nail gun’’ anyway. Outside of movies, you can’t use it as a gun without enough modification that it’s no longer the same tool.

I’d say we’re fully in agreement then. I certainly didn’t mean to imply that adding difficulty alone was somehow automatically virtuous. It’s maybe better to say there’s virtue in doing some things the hard way.

I’m actually really curious to hear your definition of virtuous! For me, it’s the ‘has an overall positive effect’ definition, not the wishy-washy ‘moral’ one.

There’s a distinct difference between doing something “the hard way” and adding unnecessary complications. “The hard way” is just a faster way of saying “without all the modern conveniences.” New York to Maine the hard way would be walking rather than driving.

The virtue in doing something the hard way is that it gives you a clearer look at the details. Walking from New York to Maine would give you a much more intimate understanding of the terrain than driving or flying.

That’s assuming that an oncoming car wouldn’t swerve at all if a cyclist entered their path. Dangerous or unpredictable behavior by anyone on a road puts everyone in the area at risk.

There’s always the Jewel Cooler:

I mean, it is 100% discrimination against people who are too old to do the job, yes.

Truth, teaching these safety rules to kids is important whether you own guns or not, so they know how to act if they ever find one.