In article ,
(George William Herbert) wrote:

The condition of the human body exposed to nearly 5,300 Gs for
a seventh of a second is "red goo on back wall of space capsule".

Right, a 500-m gun would never work for passengers (though it might
conceivably work for bulk materials like water or metals).

I do think there's some merit to the idea of a magnetic launcher
floating high in the atmosphere, but it would have to be many km long,
and it's a major engineering project -- I suspect that by the time we
could seriously ponder building one, we'll either already have an
orbital tether in hand or very close.

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