Bakersfield LIVE: Man with bomb at Chase Bank takes hostage as police swarm scene | World | News

Unconfirmed reports indicate that the armed man has claimed he has rigged the bomb-device with a dead man’s switch.

Again, these are unconfirmed reports, but we at the Daily Star are doing all we can to confirm this detail.

For those out there unfamiliar with what has become of a classic Hollywood trope, often used to ramp up the tension in countless action movies, a dead man’s switch is a fail-safe mechanism designed to activate or deactivate a system automatically if the human operator becomes incapacitated, falls asleep, or loses consciousness.

The action-movie crutch has been used most famously in the 1994 film Speed – alternatively known as The Bus That Couldn’t Slow Down, starring Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock, and Dennis Hopper.