The FDA reported an adverse incident report recently for an event that occurred in June – the report is available on the FDA website – but wasn’t reported (or for that matter, picked up on) until recently.
The patient was concealing a semi-auto pistol and was going into the MRI room for a scan. The patient got into the MRI machine, but when it activated, the magnets of the MRI machine caused the gun to discharge.
Most likely, an MRI machine – MRI is an acronym for “Magnetic Resonance Imaging,” and it uses very strong electromagnets – would pull the firing pin until it tripped the sear, allowing the hammer to hit the firing pin or striker to go forward and discharge the weapon.
The bullet struck the right buttocks of the patient, causing a slight subcutaneous wound, meaning she got a boo-boo and needed a bandage. The woman had been specifically asked if she had any weapons – which she lied about – prior to the MRI.
She was then admitted to the hospital and treated.
Getting Tests Done Can Be A Pain In The Butt
The temptation here is to make amusing remarks at this poor person’s expense, but given how potentially serious it was…this is not the incident about which to make wisecracks.
One doesn’t want to be accused of displaying too much cheek.
Hospitals generally have a no-weapons policy. While there may not be any legal consequences – though possession on hospital grounds is statutorily prohibited in some states – it can also mean being barred from the grounds if you’re caught violating the policy.
Therefore, consider carrying at hospitals very, very carefully.
It is certainly also the case that carrying a gun around an MRI machine is incredibly stupid, and she’s darn lucky she didn’t wind up with a second hole. MRI magnets can pull metal objects with more than 1200 pounds of force; have a look at this for a moment:
Hopefully, with this experience now being a part of her posterior, she has learned not to take guns around big magnets ever again. Unfortunately, some people learn the hard way, such as an attorney in Brazil did.
This is certainly a time when having a car safe would have come in handy.
Let this also be a lesson to everyone else to know when to disarm. Being able to – as safely as possible – lock your gun in a car so you can go in for a scan or do whatever in a controlled area is certainly a good thing.
After all, you don’t want to wind up being the butt of jokes.
HUGE props to the engineers and scientists for a lot of hard work, advancements in computer hardware and software, and in magnet materials and field shaping technology.
They are continuing to reduce the volume of the areas affected by MRI’s magnetic fields, significantly reducing the impact on patients who may have metals on or in their person (reducing the chance something like this will happen again).
At the same time, the newer designs are providing improved and faster imaging, and units that are more compact and require less power to operate (which greatly increases WHERE you can set up one of these. Even small facilities with lower power infrastructure will be able to install one.)