https://youtu.be/eXFq9zBpHZ8

The extra “e” in potato above is an homage to former Vice President Dan Quayle’s spelling skills. It’s also a reflection of the intelligence level of DIY IKF, a videographer who thought it wise to shoot a lead slug out of a potato gun at a nearby metal tank. Where’d it go? Not back into DIY IKF, thankfully. But let’s face it: potato guns are way too dangerous to avoid government regulation. They’ve killed people! Spud guns should be subject to minimum age requirements, background checks, the works. In fact, let’s just ban them. No one needs to shoot a tuber. I said tuber. Not YouTuber. Sheesh.

 

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57 COMMENTS

  1. F*ck you. We have the right to keep and fry potatoes. You can have my cast iron when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers.

    • “We can live with that. Anyone who loves potatoes is probably a racist.” Quote from the spokesperson from the American Rice Growers Association.

  2. Really? Ragging on Dan Quayle? Better than any of the current political crop. EXCEPT Ted Cruz…sad.

        • The story back in the day, was that he was set up by a New Jersey teacher, during a visit to a grammar school. She intentionally misspelled the word (potato) on a flash card given to VPDQ, in order to embarrass him. While doing the photo-op-spelling exercise with the children, he stated that a child misspelled the word, because it WAS misspelled on the flash card. The leftist mainstream media went nuts, proclaiming him as an idiot. Mr. Quayle was/is actually a very intelligent man. He was just caught by a pranking A-hole Lib. teacher that probably has an IQ half of his.

        • Misspell potato and you’re a retard.

          Don’t know the definition of sex, “is”, rape, don’t know where “Rose law firm records” are because you haven’t checked your server.
          Can’t figure our what a baby is but it has to be removed faster than a fing illegal alien but slower than a level 9000 jihadi in GITMO.

          fdat

    • How about ragging on the TEACHER who handed Quayle the “cue card” with “potatoe” spelled out on it? IIRC, you can see Quayle look at the card shortly before making his famous faux pas

  4. Dan Quayle now runs global investments for Cerberus Capital Management. Which owns Remington Outdoors Group. Which in turn owns Remington, Bushmaster and a whole bunch of other firearms companies.

    It’s a small ol’ world, ain’t it.

  5. Potatoes are a vile starch, growing hidden in the dirt, spreading tendrils throughout an otherwise innocuous garden. No one needs spuds.

    Forthright people of all races should embrace starches produced by upright, upstanding plants that thrive in the sun, like rice. THAT’S a starch that should be embraced.

    I say FBI background checks for all potato lovers. They are up to something, I warrant.

    • Farago seems to think he is always so clever in his writing skills and style. I can find an error in his first sentence alone. “The extra “e” in potato above is an homage..”

    • I just got an email from somebody in Toowoomba telling me I have an interview, I’m in Ohio. Boy are they confused.

  8. I’m currently working as an expat in Southeast Asia. About a month ago, I found myself explaining to wide eyed co-workers how my childhood friends and I used to build and shoot spud guns after school. One asked how I got permission to do that; saddest day I’ve had in a long while.

  9. I have built many spud guns and used them to launch thousands of pounds of idaho’s finest towards the horizon. We used various propellants and every combination of fruit/vegi/rock/ball/chalk/bolts/etc. that we could get our hands on. One night we took one into a Little Caesars Pizza and took turns with the staff launching some of every topping at the back door from across the kitchen. Ahh great memories. As long as you observe a the four rules there are hours and hours and hours and hours and hours of fun to be had for very little cost. Little did I know i was accidentally training myself to be a homicidal maniac bent on the violent destruction of civilized western society. I thought I was just wasting time giggling as potatoes flew.

    • Potatoes are a gateway ammo.

      Potay-TOW Missile systems and Thermo-nuclear fries.

      You say potato, I say 40nm M203, or at least a Spike’s Tactical 37mm launcher.

      • I suggest onions are superior ammo. More spherical. Layers of skins make them easier to load. Smellier on impact.

        • Whole onions tend to leave the same way as diced onions. They shred either on acceleration or as soon as they leave the end of the barrel. You’ve got the smellier part down but they spread fast and a single onion quickly spreads to about one MOSED (Minute Of Service Entrance Door) at any distance over 1/2 pizza kitchen. Bell peppers don’t even fire properly because once you cut the round cross section out of them they don’t even stay positioned in the barrel properly to stay ahead of the charge.

          Tomatoes do surprisingly well especially if they are not quite ripe. They do however suffer one fatal flaw that they share with most citrus fruits. They are far too juicy. While they fly pretty well and make a very satisfying splat, after about the third one there is so much juice inside the combustion chamber that things start to not work properly. Those cooked juices foul your spark source and gum up the threads where you add your propellant making both the spark unreliable at best and the cap for your propellant impossible to remove without tools.

          Apples, semi-ripe pairs, cured or cased meats and any fruit or ball that you can find that is a near exact match for your barrel diameter tend to be the best alternative by a large margin. They are dense enough to hold together during acceleration and flight. Most importantly they don’t fill your cannon with goo that gets cooked on to everything.

          In the end we always came back to potatoes though. Just enough moisture to make a good seal but not enough to get on anything. Ideal density and material strength. While it is not a wet messy “splat” they do perform a very satisfying disintegration when fired at a hard surface. The held up well when used as a wadding to propel fist fulls of gravel/nails/grapes/etc. into the horizon, and you could hollow them out to insert single harder objects like larger rocks with little to no performance drop. Most importantly . . . potatoes are CHEAP compared to anything else. We could buy 45 pounds of potatoes and a couple cans of Aquanet Extra Hold for just a few bucks and sit on the back porch and giggle as we wasted many a sunny afternoon. Good times.

        • potatoes have a density that permits carving.

          you can put a nice flat meplat, a good-ish boat-tail, and (lube not crimp) cannelure on them. Hollow point potatoes (while losing a significant amount of mass) can achieve a PTHP (plastic tip hollow point) with the additions of bacon an melted cheese toppings.

        • ” …for just a few bucks and sit on the back porch and giggle as we wasted many a sunny afternoon”…and it left lots of your cash for beer and fireball…..I’ll betcha

        • @Jim Depends on which year the afternoon fell on. Eventually you are spot on. Once I get moved in to my new place you are all invited for spud launching debauchery followed by beer and burbon!

      • Oddly, it was .22lr that was my gateway to a great many more powerful firearms. Including extensive recreational use of spud guns.

  10. They are banned, sort of. At least in Texas it’s a class III felony to be in possession of one (that may have changed, but that was what it was back when I was in high school).

  11. Go look at with the NFA branch of the ATF says about potato guns.

    They’re ALREADY illegal unregistered Destructive Devices according to them.

    Every damned thing in this world is illegal, just ask some asshole from the gov’t.

        • Yup, used to be part of the Treasury Department, but got bumped over to DOJ sometime in the relatively recent past (like, in the last 30 yrs).

          I’m sure Cruz could be persuaded to abolish some other alphabet agencies too.

          At the very least rename them so that their jackets have to have PINKIE or BUBBA or some other such unflattering acronym emblazoned upon them. lol

  12. Anybody who writes “… potato guns are way to dangerous to avoid government regulation” should not be criticizing somebody who writes “potatoe”. That should be “…way too dangerous…”

  13. When I was a kid, we built one and would load it and then pour bbs down the barrel… Turn it into a giant shotgun. Might not have been the smartest thing, in retrospect.

  15. I could be wrong, but are they illegal and banned in TX and FL? I could have sworn seeing a story about the fact that Winter Springs, FL considers them the same as any firearm?

    Our friends in Australia have outlawed them except for one area where they must be licensed. I have a friend from the UK who once saw one my brother made and recoiled claiming they surely would go to jail in the UK for simple possession.

    My point?, I believe they actually are banned for some stupid reason in different areas.

    • Have you tried to search for your answer first on the internet? Maybe try something like “Are potato guns illegal in Texas?” in a search engine like Google, or hell, even Yahoo.

    • We used to shove potatas n cars tailpipes, n start the car. Hit an a kid walkin by in the chest, he really let out a squall. Everybody just laughed. Then and now, what happend?

  16. Potato guns are just pure fun. My buddies son used mine in a high school project. Documenting projectile weights, degree of angle when shot, distance travelled, etc..
    He got an A.

    • Yes they are. An we need more pure fun n less whatever. Just aint no fun no more. To many damned laws, flushing m-80 n cherry bomb firecrackers down the toilet at school was a blast. Hahaha, blew sht all over the girls restroom, hahaha one girl came out covered n shit, man, hell, was goin say wish I was young again, nah, to many damned laws nowadays

  18. I worked on a golf course. And since I couldn’t hit the golf ball straight to save my life, I decided to give my spud gun a try… it was always fun explaining to people why my golf bag had a p.v.c. tube and a propane tank. And yes my boss and owner gave me permission to use it on the course. In fact a bunch of the employees watched me test out the range of the gun on the driving range. Turns out 10 seconds of propane would give you a good 140 yards

  20. Too bad poor old Dan trusted a jerk. A really smart guy would have congratulated the kid on being smarter than his teacher and held the card up for the camera to focus in on while pointing at it. Followed up by saying something about the need for quality education and putting the card in his pocket.

  21. B _A _ N _ _ T _ H _ E _ _ E _ P _ A _ ! ! !

    http://www.epa.gov/mercury/mercury-consumer-products#list (See Rifle “recoil suppressors” under “Sporting Equipment”)

    “The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday rejected a bid to stay the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s controversial mercury air toxics rule, a day after the agency argued that the D.C. Circuit reasonably exercised its discretion not to vacate the regulations during the agency’s revision process.” Public Policy Law360

  22. Potato guns are illegal in the great state of CA, and where CA goes the rest of the nation eventually follows…..unless they don’t.

  23. This is absolutely nothing. The things we built as kids were exponents of dangerous beyond this. I’m talking a 6′ barrel with a 10′ long 10″ pressure chamber at 120psi that would launch a shaped spud a full half mile. We would load a 3′ piece of rebar and a packing wad and launch it clean through a 3/4 piece of plywood, and that’s even when it hit the plywood flat. That thing would cut you half.
    Oh, the improvised guns we made, the things we blew up….good times…good times.

  24. I remember reading up on CA laws regarding firearms before making my first purchase years back. There was a section in the DOJ literature devoted to said potato guns. Apparently you’re required to register them with the DOJ here, otherwise be open to some ridiculous charges. Don’t remember the exact details but that was the gist of it. We used to make them all the time anyhow, I don’t think anyone, including the police, really knew they were technically DDs. As long as you were using it in a relatively safe manner everything was fine.

  25. I stopped at golf driving range in WV and saw one leaning against the wall. I asked the owner about it, and he said that he shot black walnuts(there were tons of walnut trees around, and a black walnut in it’s husk is the size of a small orange, heavy and firm when green) into the tree line (about 300 yds.) I asked if there were any legal restrictions…they all had a good laugh over that one. Mountaineers !!!

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