Can standards be wrong? Or at least, not go far enough?

Might a government entity get it wrong entirely, or jsut not be caught up on what is truly best?

I know, gasps abound at the thought, but it could well be true.

There are some devices that can e very dangerous just with regular use, and yet there can be some more modern safety engineering to those devices that make them more safe, but the standards do not reflect the changes – meaning that workers can still be compliant with standards and yet get severely hurt.

Does that make the standard inadequate? Well, it’s at least outdated, perhaps?

For this post, we’re directing our focus on those pneumatic nail guns, the ones in popular use by roofers and framers in the construction industry.

There is a consensus standard known as ANSI SNT-101 2015 which deals with the handling and operation of these nail guns, along with other similar pneumatic tools. Three high-ranking officials within NIOSH co-authored a blog post about the standard, saying that ANSI isn’t going far enough to ensure better safety among workers who operate or in the vicinity of a pneumatic nail gun.

The three NIOSHers, including director John Howard, wrote the blog saying that the ANSI standard is really missing an opportunity to optimize safety, as it fails to consider what is called sequential triggering of nail guns and instead continues to address nail guns with the standard contact triggering.

The three blog authors reiterate the importance of safety, and they insist that ANSI has a duty to maximize safety among workers whenever possible, and in this case it means being more specific in mentioning sequential-trigger nail guns as the preferred choice for construction projects.

A contact-triggered nail gun, which is the one that was in wide popular use for decades, is the gun that shoots out a nail every time it comes into contact with a surface, and it can easily fire off multiple nails in quick succession by “bumping” against the surface. While that can be fast and efficient, research showed that contact-triggering can lead to double-fires and accidental fires, which means nails can come out unintentionally and cause injuries to body parts when the worker is not expecting the discharge.

With a sequential trigger, a nail gun only discharges a nail after a two-step process, which is to press the gun against a surface and then pull the trigger. The gun does not discharge accidentally or double fire because the user has to do both steps every time.  This has shown to be a much safer way of operating a nail gun and it greatly reduces injury and the risk of injury.

The authors of the blog post (which you can read here), call the ANSI standard “scientifically unsound” because it does not “require sequential triggers for all construction operations” because of its increased safety. Information about nail guns and related standards can be found at this link.

Perhaps this is one type of gun control that we could all embrace, right?