Australian Man Gunned Down in Driveway by Killer Robot

An 81-year-old Australian man has shot himself dead with an elaborate suicide robot built using plans he downloaded from the Internet.

The Gold Coast man, who lived alone, left notes of his plans and thoughts as he struggled to come to terms with demands by interstate relatives that he move out his home and into care.

He spent hours searching the Internet for a way to kill himself, downloaded what he needed and then built a complex machine that would remotely fire a gun.

He set the device up in his driveway about 7 a.m. Wednesday, placed himself in front of it and set it in motion.

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I remember reading yesterday a post about an investment broker on an internet chat board asking for "the best way" to commit suicide, asking for elaborate suggestions. This is about as elaborate as it gets, I think. What a strange world we live in.

Although if the poor guy had done his research, he'd have known that lots of Darvon, a garbage bag and a rubber band are better.

maybe it's different in australia but i bet it ain't, these days painkillers are tightly controlled and even people in terrible pain have trouble getting them, only the drug addicts seem to find a way to get these kinds of drugs

plus i think the ingenuity here speaks for itself, most "final exit" suicides will not even make the back pages of the newspaper, this way his story is told around the world

i don't know what he was suffering from that was going to require the assisted care but having alzheimer's in the family i fully understand why he might not want to go down THAT road and find himself trapped in the machine unable to stop the pain or even understand why he was trapped in a bed with a lot of tubes...

i say kudos to an ingenius old man who went out on his own terms and got a little bit of passing notoriety in the process -- and all without gunning down a post office or a schoolyard -- he even found a way that he'd be discovered by strangers rather than family to avoid causing additional pain to his family

but yet, he was able to build a suicide robot. Doesn't sound like he needed assisted care to me.

On edit: why build a robot to shoot a pistol when he could have done it himself?

that he may have had concerns about only one shot getting the job done quickly.

Regards, Mugu

if i was forced to speculate at gunpoint by a mad robot, i'd think the reason was maybe parkinson's or another cause of shaky hands, not yet so bad that i couldn't work on a project slowly and taking breaks, but bad enough "intention tremor" that i would be afraid of shooting poorly and seriously hurting but not killing myself

plausible?