Suicide

[xoxoxoBruce]

The MASH theme song says, "Suicide Is Painless". Of course that is absolute, unequivocal, bullshit.
If you overdose with some drugs and never wake up, conventional wisdom is you felt no pain, nor will you ever again.
Well whoopty do, hooray for you, what about the people you've betrayed? What about the people you've inflicted
with a pain that doctors can't cure, and will haunt them for the rest of their lives?

Ok, I've said my piece, but I came here to show you this grizzly suicide helmet, built and used by a depressed young man.

I saw a reference to it with a link to Redditt somewhere I don't remember. The information is sketchy and far from complete.

My brother-in-law shadowed a coroner for a few weeks who showed him this strange contraption from a case 40+ years old.
Apparently a young man constructed a suicide helmet that fired eight shotgun shells into his head simultaneously.

It think the guy who wrote this was probably studying to be an undertaker or a doctor wanting to be a medical examiner,
as he's pretty clinical writing what he discovered.

From my brother-in-law: "At the apex of each projection there is a hollow metal tube into which a nail was fitted
so as to be very close to the primer on each of the protrusion's shotgun shells. The inside pic [below] shows a few of
the shells pretty clearly. The nails were all wired together as well and wire leads were then attached to an arc welder
which was to provide the electricity that would ignite the primer and cause them to fire.
The nails are all absent from the helmet in its current state, as are the wires that connected the nails together,
and the wire that was to connect to the arc welder. The wiring was believed to be metal from coat hangers.
The whole helmet is covered in a fiberglass/epoxy shell that both maintained the integrity of the helmet during
the blast and contained the resulting mess.

I gleaned from the Redditt comments the man pulled the trigger, so to speak, just as his mother walked in the room.
Do you think it was painless for her?

The side with the three protrusions was the front, and the one at the top of the head was wired up like the others,
but also had a manual activation, as though it was his fail-safe if the electricity didn't cause the shells to fire.
There's a bit of rubber tubing that was designed to go from one side of the protrusion on the top of the helmet to
the other side of that same protrusion, like a sling-shot.
The pathologist that did the autopsy said that the rubber tubing was attached to the nail in the top such that the
nail could be pulled straight up, which put tension on the tubing and when released would propel the nail into the
primer of the top shell, causing it to detonate and fire.

There are holes visible in the helmet opposite some of the shells - they're the holes from the shot, .33 inch lead balls,
that passed through his head and embedded themselves in the helmet. He knew something about the skull: thicker
and stronger at the front where he placed three shells. it would have made more sense, for maximum kill power,
to put the shells at his temples, but it seems like he may have been trying to tic boxes for both 'homogenous skull
obliteration' and 'maximum death.' This kid was sharp.

On one side, there's a hole through the helmet from the shell opposite it. It also looks like he placed the shells in
such a way so the shot would penetrate the majority of the brain tissue. The inside pic shows this pretty well and
you can see the holes at 6, 12, and 2 o'clock opposite the shells at 12, 6, and 7 o'clock respectively.
The others were aimed downward enough to miss the helmet oppositely, or simply didn't go through the cranium.
Not only was this a feat of electrical design, but it had a backup system, and was made specifically to defeat
the skull anatomy. This kid was brilliant. And all pre-internet."

I will give the guy credit, he didn't take an AK-47, or a bomb, and try to take a bunch of people with him, but that may
be just because it wasn't de rigueur 40 years ago.

[glatt]

Wow. Just wow.

Razor sharp kid, and yet, so stupid.