It gets worse:

Instead of seeking expert advice on how to retrieve the weapon, one officer decided to activate the emergency shutdown button.

"This action caused the MRI's magnet to rapidly lose superconductivity, leading to the evaporation of approximately 2,000 liters of helium gas and resulting in extensive damage to the MRI machine," the suit said.

The officer then retrieved his gun, but left a magazine full of bullets on the floor of the MRI office, the suit says.

Radiologist here. There are multiple safety zones (four to be precise) around the machine and extensive screening procedures are required to access the inner zones. The magnet of an MRI is always on and extremely strong. However, you need to be pretty close for it to pull a gun from your hands. Like, less than a few meters. That would be zone 4. He should never have been that close.

The button he pressed is called a quench. It's for life threatening emergencies only. Think "patient trapped between the machine and a metal object." It vents the liquid helium used to keep it superconductive and basically destroys the machine, but the magnetic field dissipates in minutes. There is a way to wind the machine down without destroying it in situations that aren't life threatening or for servicing, but it takes hours for the magnetic field to dissipate and even longer to bring it back.

If I ever saw a building using more power, my automatic assumption would be a big machine is inside.

If it were ridiculously high, then my next guess would be a crypto mining farm.

Ain't no way modern LED lamps for growing plants gonna be drawing that much power.

Not to mention any of these fools could have just as easily sent someone inside to check. Or if they really wanted to play coppers so bad, book a fake appointment or even just pretend to be a news agency to ask for a tour.

The summary just says gun, so I assumed hand gun. it was a rifle.

The Naked Gun 444+¼

Maybe this could have been avoided if he only had 13 hours of training... 😥

But for real, I hope they pull the money from the pension of everyone involved, and then fire everyone involved for being literally to fucking stupid. So many people had an opportunity to do anything, to use a brain cell, but not a single one did.

At the end of the article, which is already a litany of clownish buffoonery, it states that after destroying (effectively) the MRI machine in order to retrieve the rifle, he failed to retrieve a loaded magazine. So it was just left on the floor as they left.

Edit: autocorrect had changed it to clownfish

I feel like all public servants (including cops) ought to have public liability insurance, where money would end up coming from in these situations, which then the employer (police department, other department) needs to pay, the employee is aware of, and is part of their renumeration (i.e. the more their premiums cost, the less they're making), making idiots more of a financial liability to themselves.

Quite quickly you're going to have people acting as responsibly as possible if you're insurance premiums then go up when you act like a moron.

Obviously this would require protections so that people don't end up being screwed over by insurance premiums, but still, this seems to be an issue in public service all over the world, no consequences because the tax payer just ends up footing the settlement, and the public servant goes on their merry way.

Didn’t I read somewhere once that to be a cop, you can’t have an IQ over a certain threshold? I’m not sure if that was an urban legend or not, but this…..

This certainly lends to its credibility.

Could I theoretically make my home immune to guns by surrounding it with kevlar-coated MRIs

What the fuck? Anyone mining crypto or running servers at home better watch out before their energy company tips off their local gang and gets them raided.

Go solar.