"Wanted" - Water Saver?

From wili hybrid

I watched Wanted on HBO the other day. The action was quite intense and made me wish I could beat my heart 400 times a minute. But somehow, thinking of the movie today brought me to one particular scene: when Wesley came back to his old house to retrieve his "father's" handgun.

A bit of background: Wesley dumped the handgun into the container of his toilet the day before because he thought the abduction was a dream (watch the movie, or read the plot, but the main thing is that the handgun is in the toilet).

Wouldn't that save a lot of water though? If every household owns one handgun and stores it in the toilet (yes, this is far-fetched....), how much water would the US save?

The volume of a an average pistol is no where to be found on the internet. So using 1100g as the standard weight of a handgun, and using a density less than steel 7.4 g/cm^3 (because of the plastics and other metals), the volume of a handgun is around .149 liters of volume. Assuming that this that the census data is quite accurate, 115 million households will exist.

115,000,000*.149 = 17135000 liters

which really isn't a lot. Except that it's the amount of water saved per flush. Using a conservative estimate of 2 flush a day for each household (with each household only having 1 toilet...):

2*365*17135000 = 1.251*10^10 liters

It's a respectable amount of water (apparently 1/40 of the water in the Sydney Harbor). I guess saving a gun in neither practical nor that economical (a savings around 330 million).

-runiteking1

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