Have you ever thought of being able to put a face mask on a person who’s refusing to wear mask when most are required to prevent the coronavirus from further spreading? The good news is that a majority of people comply in wearing masks in areas where authorities require them but there is still that small minority that refuses to do so. What is even worse is that they’re a noisy bunch and they’re all over the news either for a real belief that not wearing masks is their exercise of freedom or they just want their 15 minutes of fame.

Well, someone came up with a solution to make one wear mask, by shooting a mask onto the non-wearer’s face, if it actually works.

Allen Pan, who runs the YouTube channel “Sufficiently Advanced” with over a million subscribers, took upon himself to design and fabricate a mask gun. With American resorting to guns when solving problems perhaps making a mask gun will do the trick as well, and without bullets being expended.

Similar to the concept of the Net Gun, the contraption is a CO2 powered mask gun that uses 800psi of pressure to propel a mask towards target non-wearer. In testing to a non-moving dummy head, it seems to work. He then brought it to Huntington Beach in California, which is a hotbed of rabid anti-maskers, but he was disappointed that there is already a high proportion of mask wearers. Perhaps people in the area started heeding the government instructions to wear masks given that California is one the most severely affected states.

He was able to find some willing individuals to test it the mask gun as a “focus group.” Too bad it does not really work as intended, perhaps it needs to be refined further but really it’s tough to shoot a mask onto an area of the face, especially if the target is moving unless you are Spiderman.  If he works on something that covers the whole head, then he might be more successful, but then, it’s not really a face mask.

It’s a cool idea and we do welcome such device to ensure that people wear their masks. But at the end of the day, it’s more about the right messaging that people will compel to comply in wearing masks.  Problem some governments have messed up in their messaging, putting their countries into worse situation than intended.

Why not just build a mask scanner that allows entry into the premises if a person is wearing mask and then does not open the door if a person does not? Geez, I need to rush to the USPTO to patent this quick.