Obviously, a giant gun that rapidly shoots ping pong balls is totally awesome enough on its own to warrant your attention, but just wait until you hear why it was built in the first place.

This fully automatic, table tennis slingshot gatling gun comes from Joerg Sprave (and his awesome accent) of The Slingshot Channel, and it is an eight-barreled marvel of little plastic mayhem.

This “very complicated build” required PVC piping to help guide the very light ping pong balls, and a transmission “to lower the speed of the battery drill” so it wouldn’t rotate faster than the balls could handle. It also uses rubber bands to help keep the balls in place, so it can be fired downward without them just rolling out, thick rope that helps push the balls, and a great little firing mechanism.

(Side note: Can this guy be the new villain in the next James Bond film? He seems like a nice guy, but who has a better laugh than he does? Plus, he looks like astronaut Scott Kelly came back from space after absorbing the power of the sun.)

So why make something like this in the first place? It was actually commissioned by a televis…..you know what, I’ll let his write-up for the video tell you.

“Sometimes we do get interesting job offers, like this “punisher” gatling. It will be used in a crazy TV show, against the behind of protagonists who gave wrong answers. Therefore, it had to be weak in order to avoid injuries.”

If there has ever before been a more beautiful paragraph written, I don’t want to know about it.

To answer your obvious followup: no, it was not a Japanese game show. It’s for some show in the UK. I’m just as stunned as you are.

While he worries about how to get it through customs, you tell us what you’d use this gun for, good or evil, in the comments below.

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HT: Gizmodo
Image: Joerg Sprave/YouTube