Actually, there were multiple attempts to reverse engineer lazy guns.
The Lip City incident involved a Lazy Gun self-destructing while being disassembled. This resulted in a kiloton range antimatter explosion, which killed about half a million people, and spread radioactive fallout from nearby reactors over the city.
The incident that generated the nanobang holes, and resulted in a hemispherical chunk of landscape being swapped for a lake, took place when someone at the Anifrast Institute of Technology's labs tried pointing an electron microscope down a Lazy Gun's lens.