YouTuber invents gun that shoots masks onto people’s faces
LOS ANGELES - Despite increasing scientific evidence and guidance from medical experts backing face masks as a key tool in preventing the spread of COVID-19, many people have been reluctant to wear one, leading YouTuber Allen Pan to create a device that launches a face mask directly into an individual’s face.
“America has a pandemic problem so I solved it by making a gun,” tweeted Pan, along with a video about the mask gun.4
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Pan, an “engineer, educator, YouTuber, hitchhiker and overall imagination man,” according to the website for the popular Television show “MythBusters: The Search,” on which he was a contestant, set out to develop a “mask gun.”
Pan’s video highlights altercations between individuals refusing to wear a facial coverings and others. In the nine-minute video, which had been viewed more than 1.3 million times as of Aug. 19, Pan criticizes people who refuse to wear facial coverings in public, calling them “mask-holes.”
“It feels like people aren’t wearing masks, and they should be,” Pan says in his video. “An American problem demands American solutions. I’m going to put together the Second Amendment with health care.”
The device, which Pan calls “alien sci-fi alt-history steampunk,” comes loaded with a disposable surgical mask fitted with a foam adhesive to allow it to stick to a person’s face when launched.
CO2 bulbs generating 800 psi of pressure help effectively shoot the surgical mask onto a face, while a laser pointer helps aim the device.
To test his new contraption, Pan wrote in the description for his video that he “brought it to Huntington Beach, which is one of the most anti-mask cities in southern California. What could possibly go wrong?”
He proceeded to test the device on a dummy head. When asked what he thinks of the invention, one onlooker said, “I think it’s priceless.”
“If you saw someone walking in like a Walmart and they weren’t wearing a mask, would you shoot them with this?” Pan asks a group at the beach.
“Yes,” said a woman.