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Nail guns are ubiquitous in the wood frame construction industry and, with the availability of mega-supply stores for weekend warriors, they have also become commonplace in that hands consumers of all competency levels. Now new research has documented the extent to which this equipment is posing a serious injury hazard - and how easily this risk might be mitigated.
I received my warning about nail guns from a colleague, Dr. Hester Lipscomb. Hester doesn't fit the obvious profile of a crusader. She is a polite and friendly academic based at Duke University, not exactly a center of progressive activism. But Hester's work on nail gun injuries - with a decade's worth of experience - has taught her that even when a solution to a bad problem is obvious and inexpensive, making change happen is an uphill struggle that requires research linked to advocacy. Simple facts Hester's work has taught me about nail guns: they are potentially dangerous and they have become increasingly popular with the general public. Those two facts combined explain why one third of the many hospital emergency department visits for nail gun wounds occur among consumers, not professionals.
That such injury scenarios have become the stuff of TV forensic drama only serves to underscore that this problem is widespread indeed. Aficionados of the serial Bones will certainly remember the tongue-in-cheek "Beaver in the Otter" episode in which the ultimate cause of death for the murder victim was found to be an fatal nail gun puncture to the heart. This had happened when Molly, the pep rally organizer, fires off the tool in order to fend off the Beaver's sexual advances and then he pulls out the nail, bringing on hemorrhage. Or, as the Bones official website summarizes, "At the lab, Brennan and Arastoo work to determine the murder weapon. From the puncture, they have gleaned that the weapon was uniform in thickness. It is also apparent that the weapon was pulled out. It stabbed the victim quickly, but was removed slowly. What could do this? Brennan looks at a tray of possibilities and picks up a nail. Beaver was shot with a nail gun." (http://www.fox.com/bones/recaps/season-4/episode-24.php)
The good news is that there is a fairly simply preventive measure that would drastically reduce the frequency of nail gun wounds. An easy and cheap substitution of a trigger that will only operate when the nail gun is first depressed against its intended target prevents misfiring that occur when the trigger is engaged first (often the easiest position to hold the gun), allowing discharge against the next thing the nail gun happens to bump up against (for example, the operator's other hand or a co-worker's leg, arm or chest). The bad news is this safety back-up, known as a sequential trigger, is neither required by the Consumer Product Safety Commission that oversees consumer tools nor OSHA that is supposed to protect workers.
In addition to studying the patterns of injury among construction workers and the general public, Dr. Lipscomb has also gone into the field to find out what sales staff and equipment rental store employees are telling customers about nail guns. Many minimized the potential dangers in nail gun use, the need for training in general, and trigger function in particular. As one salesperson advised, "You don't need to know anything about the trigger, you can read anything on the Internet these days-everyone is an expert, just ignore that stuff." Of course this was less dismissive than another nail gun salesperson's response to Hester's inquiries about safe usage, "Princess, If I tell you, what are the chances you are going to know what it means?" (http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajim.20954/pdf)
