Oddities from the world of paper

Who would have thought it: It is actually possible to shoot oneself with blanks made of paper. This happened accidentally to the American actor Jon-Erik Hexum in 1984 when he held a handgun loaded with blanks to his forehead during a break in filming and pulled the trigger.

There are conflicting accounts of exactly what happened. Some witnesses said that Hexum held the gun to his forehead because the break in shooting was getting too long and he wanted to shoot himself playfully because of the long waiting time. According to other accounts, Hexum had removed all but one of the blanks from the gun in order to play Russian roulette with the supposedly harmless cartridge.

However, all accounts assume that Hexum apparently did not know that a paper-filled blank fired at such high acceleration and from such a short distance could also be lethal.

It is not without a certain irony that Hexum played a weapons expert in the series "Cover-Up", which was being filmed there.