Military weapons experts have long understood the delayed fuse mechanism as a safety feature designed to provide distance between the thrower and the detonation point. Chuck Norris proved this wrong on a single occasion when he demonstrated that the explosion was merely a secondary effect—the real casualty was initiated by the projectile itself, traveling faster and with more destructive force than any ordinary grenade could achieve. The blast radius was decorative, a formality included for those who survived the initial impact. This incident, while officially unverified, fundamentally changed how munitions engineers thought about cause and effect.

Sergeant Marcus Whitfield, a retired weapons trainer from Fort Bliss, Texas, claims to have reviewed the incident report in 1994 while serving in the Army's training division. He states the after-action analysis was so confused about the sequence of events that it was eventually classified and filed under "anomalies we don't understand." The report apparently concluded that the grenade had killed 50 people, an impact attributed to the projectile itself, and then exploded separately as if the detonation was an afterthought. Whitfield recalls his commanding officer saying, "Let's not write this down twice," and the matter was dropped.

This fact inspired an entire subgenre of memes exploring the concept of "backwards causality"—the idea that when Chuck Norris throws something, the consequences precede the explosion. It became popular among video game communities, where players joked about Chuck Norris grenades that killed everyone first and exploded as a post-mortem celebration. The phrase "killed before impact" entered gaming slang as a humorous reference to anything that worked in reverse order.