Pause for a moment, if you will, to consider the simple brilliance of the axe-throwing bar. It’s an obvious idea, in retrospect: Who wouldn’t want to go out, get plastered, and fling extremely sharp, potentially fatal objects against a wall? What more could you want? What could possibly go wro—oh, right. Basically everything.
Case in point: One woman at a Colorado axe-throwing bar almost wound up taking a hatchet to the face recently when the axe she threw bounced off her wooden target—and came flying right back towards her, TODAY reports.
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Luckily, the woman, Ainsley, was either relatively sober or possessed parahuman reflexes—maybe some combination of the two?—because she somehow managed to duck the axe right as it was rocketing towards her head. The near-accident was caught on film by Ainsley’s friend, and the footage is basically enough to give you a panic attack:
From what we can see in the eight-second clip, it looks like Ainsley lobbed the axe too low, and it hit the rubber mat on the ground before it bounced up and off the wooden target, sending it sailing straight back at her skull. Aside from the bad throw and weird form, it doesn’t seem like she did anything particularly wrong—the ricochet was just some scary-ass, Final Destination-style fluke.
For what it’s worth, axe-throwing bars are generally pretty safe. According to Eater, many of them limit the amount of drinks you can buy per hour, so you can’t get fully shit-faced and sling ancient weapons of war around. Some also require guests to take a brief safety training before they’re allowed to go to town.
“Every guest who throws an ax inside our venue is required to participate in a 15-minute safety and training tutorial where we demonstrate proper throwing mechanics, procedures, and handling of axes,” Max Klein of Brooklyn’s Kick Axe Throwing told the New York Post. “Additionally, every guest participating in ax throwing does so with an assigned Axe Pro at their side at all times, so no guest is ever free throwing without instruction, like what you see in the video.”
Sure, axe-throwing bars may be safer than getting drunk and shooting your buddy in a bulletproof vest or whatever, but if you are actively drinking around literal axes, there’s always a chance things might take a turn for the worst. Just try to pull an Ainsley and duck in time—or, you know, maybe stick to darts?
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