Ken, oh dear,
My entire career has been with equipment and chemistry that kills people. In our sector, we are the only company out of 27 competitors not to have had a fatal accident, and we sell more units than 80% of the others.
One of our competitors killed one in 11 members of the public that bought his kit. Another killed one in 17, and sold over 1100. We publish the fatalities online - I will PM you the link to the list.+
My youth included things like trying to run an engine on nitroglycerine (age 13 or 14) as there was no internet then explaining nitro-injection uses liquid nitrous oxide not a pint of pressurised nitroglycerine, discovering why it is quite important that casting moulds are REALLY dry before pouring molten metal into them, and many other really dumb things, before going onto to learn through a proper apprenticeship, and universities, for a career working in nuclear power generation design and then a whole pile of safety technologies, many of them military. I have more than 4 decades of that experience, and still learning. Nobody has ever called my activity lame before. Even my son told me, he would be astonished if I die from old age, though I am doing my best to prove him wrong.
The reason people are telling you something is dangerous is not because they are lame, it is because they have seen what kills people, first hand. They have become an expert by making or seeing all possible mistakes in a limited field.
One of the courses I teach now is on high pressure oxygen safety. I start by saying nobody is injured by HP oxygen, then show a long list of dead people and dates, many slides of their dead bodies (dead, not injured), and film clips on how they got that way. For example, the German guy who thought it was a bright idea to set up an oxygen therapy chamber to sleep in (idiots who believe oxygen makes them young when if fact it is toxic and is why those who don't take short cuts, grow old and die due to free radicals from oxidative damage). It was hot during the summer, so he installed a bathroom fan in his chamber. Pictures of the wall of his house taken out, his foot on his lawn but the rest of him somewhere else. That sort of thiing.
An old flying instructor I know summed things up well, "Lawyers and ex-police tend to make the worst pilots because some from that group think laws don't apply to them, and then there are the ones who don't follow procedure and do things properly, taking shortcuts on the lessons that many paid with their lives to give us." Going into reloading instead of flying, if in those categories, may not be a wise choice. If you want to do potentially dangerous things, think what is the worst that could happen and remove the potential, otherwise the worst things will happen when you least expect. Putting a live round into what is a chamber with blocked barrel, then sawing through the primer, or even resizing it while in that state, is a roulette game. Just trust me on this one.
