Investigative Report: Nail gun safety under fire as injuries soar
Dangerous models sold despite years of warnings
By Andrew McIntosh - amcintosh@sacbee.com
Published 12:00 am PDT Sunday, April 13, 2008
With a 2 1/2-inch nail deep in his chest, construction worker Manuel Murillo slid into a pickup truck, bracing himself for a desperate seven-mile drive down a snowy Sierra road. His friend and co-worker, Salvador Cardenas, was driving. When they finally got cell phone reception, Murillo, 30, called his wife in nearby Portola to tell her there had been an accident. He had shot himself with a nail gun while working on a mountain cabin. And he was going to die. "I love you," he said, before hanging up. Murillo had been struck down by a popular tool of his trade - the air-powered nail gun - equipped with a mechanism that allowed automatic firing. As the tool's popularity surged during the building boom of the 2000s, a Sacramento Bee investigation found, nail gun injuries also took off despite decades of warnings from researchers and doctors that the guns are dangerous, especially in the automatic mode known as "contact trip."
Thank you so much for posting this!!! I will never ever purchase one of these. If a construction professional can kill himself accidentally so easily with this product, should it be on the market? What about the stay at home dads and moms who do all those projects at home? Do you get stand alone regulatory agency creds for these types of postings??
Posted by: Summer Rhodes | April 29, 2008 at 07:42 AM