Finally, a use for those old K rations. MREs just don’t have the same impact as a well tossed, expired can of “ham and m***********s,” bulging with Korean war era botulism.
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And with Seinfeld-like timing, this:
You can’t make this shit up.
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She was obviously under the influence of the hoodie she was wearing!
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Needs the title for full effect.
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I keep coming back, waiting on one of y’all to reassure me that this whole thing was just a misunderstanding. That the this person was making some sort of hypothetical statement, like for instance. “Hey if there’s a food drive that day toss the cans at the school shooter,” but none of y’all has managed to do so yet. I have m more depressed… Well I’m over it, but damn humanity. Can’t we do better than this? This person, is not just a teacher, but in charge of a group of teachers. WTF?
On the other, darker more realistic hand.
School administrators, employers and others in charge of things tend to cook up contingency plans for various crises that make no fucking sense at all. “Hide under your desk if a gunman comes along!” is clearly fucking stupid, RUN, and fast, and in the opposite direction. Hiding is the plan because the school administrator wants to maintain control over the situation more than they care about the lives of their students. (Well, over the 39K lifetimes they might have to live to expect to experience one of these situations etc.)
No, hiding in plain sight from someone with a gun is NEVER the best blanket policy, sure at some point, in some place hiding behind a locked door is better than running away. As horrific and all too common as these tragedies have been, they are not common enough for any particular fact about them to be statistically significant, so no, we are not going to have that argument. You need 30+ cases and a means to clearly differentiate between the ‘stayed and hid’ groups and the ‘ran in fear’ groups, at a minimum, and we haven’t even begun to discuss removing the special causes of variation.
Although carrying in cans of peas to chuck at the prospective school shooter seems… Well a sort of stupidity imported from some alternate universe…
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You are leading me to a thought.
What about… drumrolls please… bullet-resistant desks? With handles at the bottom side, so you could take them as shields? Could this be sold at substantial profit to some school admins?
If you cannot make stupidity disappear, you can at least profit from it…
Canned food drives have really changed since my day.
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You would make a metric crap-ton of the monies!
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INFANTry?
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Actually, tuna cans would probably work much better than other sized cans - they are smaller, but fit better in the hand.
On the other hand, what about proactively disarming the shooter, say, by passing better gun laws…
Naw…
It has an edge made of plastic fishing line? That doesn’t sound very effective. 
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I’ve never had any complaints from my garroting victims 
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I think we can probably simply purchase and re-brand and entire line of office/school furniture we find to be the most resistant to small arms fire. All we need is a bunch of furniture, copiers computers etc, a firing range and some guns. That sounds like a lot of fun right there. The thing is, I can almost justify this enough to do it, people dumb enough to fall for it are going to do something else stupid with that money anyway, right?
I couldn’t sell someone a desk which might actually conceal you a bullet resistant unless it was, but absurdity of hiding under the typical student desk and closing your eyes so the bad guy can’t see you is such I don’t really think it would bother me a bit. Heck throwing cans at a gunman barely sounds stupid in that context.
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The market has already offered up some school-supplies-as-body armor solutions…
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Axe body spray with a Bic lighter makes a pretty good flame thrower, but not nearly as impressive as a can of WD-40.
Edit: It has been brought to my attention that WD-40 now uses CO2 as a propellent. It’s been over 20 years since I tried WD-40 as a flame thrower and at that time I believe the propellent was butane. So I don’t really know how effective WD-40 is today as a fiery defensive weapon.
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No wonder, given that WD-40 is all light hydrocarbons, with CO2 as propellant. The body sprays contain flammable materials as well, but typically way more volatile ones; burn faster and not carry the flame far enough.
Thought… what about a spray formulated specifically as a flamethrower? Add some thixotropic thickener, that would flow well under high shear (e.g. when flowing through the tube out of the can and through the nozzle), but become a sticky gel once it stops moving (after landing on the target)? Some such formulations are based on polyisobutylene.
Existing spray cans of WD-40 or other kind of hydrocarbon-based cleaning/lubricating spray could be possibly modded by injecting the thickener through the valve, using a jig designed for that purpose.
You may also like to test the flammability and flame carrying properties of the white-vaseline based lubricating sprays. My hunch is that the flow properties and viscosity may be good but the flammability is likely to be inferior, unless the vaseline is diluted by some solvent.
Edit: The internal pressure of the can can be reduced down to atmospheric or even below by cooling the can and condensing the propellant, if it is propane/butane/isobutane. Carbon dioxide would need much deeper freezing for such effect, though dry ice may work. However, the frozen content of the can may block the tube and prevent the inflow of the viscosity modifier.
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I think it was Vavoom freezing spray, or some sort of Aussie brand product. A friend and I tried it at a rather drunken party in my very small kitchen, I thought we were going to burn the house down. It’s alcohol with butane as a propellent. (Well it was 20 years ago anyway) The stuff was quite terrifying, wasp and hornet killer[1] is even more awesome, but we were smart enough to try that one outside.
1: It’s basically carberautor cleaner, but with a very strong jet.
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maybe they could blind the assailants, with science!
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The last time I used WD-40 as a flame thrower it was as a weapon against a rather persistently annoying wasp.
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I was thinking in terms of flammable aerosols that would not stand out in many/most school/work environments.
Even as a software engineer I doubt most of my cow-orkers would blink twice at a can of WD-40 in my cubical.
And please see my edit re WD-40 and CO2.
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