They're out there, no doubt. You just don't hear about them.
When I was in high school, my friends and I made a potato gun. They were illegal so we took it into the desert to shoot it off a few times. We were firing these things and having a great time. Probably shot off a dozen but then a cop car pulls in and we thought we were screwed. We had just finished building it so we were bummed about possibly getting in trouble with it on our first outing.
Cops get out and we were just kind of frozen in place. My friend tried to lower the potato gun down out of site but the thing is like 4-5 feet long and had a chamber on it that was made from 4" ABS pipe. There's no way to hide the thing so he just kind of stood there with it at his side.
The walk over and ask what we were doing and we said we came out into the middle of nowhere to shoot a couple of potatoes. Without skipping a beat the cop just says, "lets see it". We loaded one up and put a little more hair spray into the chamber trying to show off what we made. We fired the thing off and cop who I suspect was higher up the chain starts laughing and looks over to his partner and said, "see, I told you these things are bad ***".
They asked for one more shot and after we were done they told us to keep it out in the desert and we wouldn't have any problems.
Pretty cool guys and I think they respected the fact that we took our business to the middle of nowhere so we wouldn't cause a problem.