Tears are a sign of weakness, right? At least that is what most of the world thinks. This design graduate from Netherlands just proved the strength of human tears by creating a gun that turns tears into bullets.
Owning a gun is not as expensive as buying the bullets. But now, you have an infinite supply of bullets for life. When you cry, the innovative gun collects your tears that flow down the brass tubes into the gun and are frozen into bullets with a bottle of dry ice. It made an appearance at the Dutch Design Week.
Yi-Fei Chen, the designer behind the project, says that the gun is meant more as “visual metaphor” than a weapon. She created the gun after she got into an argument with her teacher. Having been raised in Taiwan, Chen was not comfortable questioning or disagreeing with her teachers. It is not only acceptable but an expected behavior in Netherlands. A tutor of her’s set up a deadline that was unrealistic for Chen, and she got reprimanded for not submitting that assignment on time.
“I was too emotional to control myself, I could not hold my tears, so I cried,” she told. “I turned my back to the others because I did not want people to see me crying.”
Then, the idea of tear gun popped in her mind, and she began to work on it to present it at the Dutch Design Week. The freaky idea got popular after an article was published in Design Taxi and came in an outpour of hilarious tweets.
Yen-An Chen used her gun to point and shoot at her tutor, and it was found to cause no damage. Even though it is super safe, the concept is highly creative, so it got appreciated.
Here is a video from the designer herself, explaining all the little details. As for the rest of the world, the gun is neither going to be commercially available, nor anyone is planning to make the tear bullets any stronger.