Yep, but less painful.
Well, he’s definitely been in the vicinity of at least one too many.
He apparently also managed to get his head in the way of a speeding bullet once too often also.
Yeah, it sounds like he was already dead before this explosion, so it didn’t do him much harm.
His ex-girlfriend (an Army nurse) thought he had TBI (traumatic brain injury)–from bombs and explosions from his service in Afghanistan…
Poor guy.
He should probably be regarded as a hidden casualty of war, even if he never gets counted as one.
There are probably thousands more like him.
I wonder what sort of detonator he used? If he shot himself first, it apparently wasn’t “push button, go boom”. Was it a timer, or a remote? And if a remote, then that would imply that someone else was involved.
He could have hit the button simultaneously with the gun
The late husband of a friend of mine is one such. Was a SEAL over there in the Sandbox. Once back home & out of the service became increasingly wacky & dangerous-seeming then killed himself. In a much less dramatic or public way. But still dead and from my POV every bit a war casualty. I’m just grateful he didn’t murder-suicide his wife too. That sure seemed the way to bet as he was spiralling in.
Ref the bomb+gun part, easy enough for the SF guy to have rigged his bomb(s) with a short timer, or heck even conventional burning string fuze. Then shot himself sometime during his planned delay, be that 10 seconds or 3 minutes.
Certainly there are ways he could have done it. But I’d really like to see them definitively rule out a remote detonator.
A web search using Google, DuckDuckGo, or (I assume Bing!) on “TBI” immediately returns a sheaf of results for “traumatic brain injury” (and consistently one result for Tennessee Bureau of Investigation”) and no results for any of the obviously hyperbolic terms you list. This incessant whinging by certain posters that even commonly used and easily searched jargon and acronyms must be explicitly spelled out in every single usage is tiresome and exasperating, especially on a topic so widely covered in the context of combat veterans.
Yeah, this isn’t a “Walter White building an articulating machine gun mount” level of difficulty. There are any number of ways to easily set up a time delay or remotely fired device, and as this appears to be all commercial pyrotechnics and common fuels as accelerants, it isn’t as if there was any need for high voltage source to initiate a commercial detonator or staged charges. Although news sources persist in characterizing this as an “explosion” (and that the open bed of the Cybertruck somehow “contained” the blast field) it is clear that these ‘journalists’ are ignorant on this topic and have not done the basic diligence of consulting an actual expert, and are just repeating the same each other. The actual event was a deflagration (fire) that might have looked impressive and even produced an audible acoustic pulse but didn’t even do as much damage as a small pipe bomb would have.
Stranger
At least we know the last thing to go through his mind.
Stop blaming the media for using the same term officials use in describing the event.
Maybe it is just me but I think that it is the job of journalists to question the claims of authorities and independently verify that they make sense.
Nevada is actually home for a lot of demolition companies that have copious experience with explosives, and I can attest by experience how willing those guys are to expounding at painful length and excruciating detail about different types of explosives and the means of initiating them.
Stranger
It’s not just you, but it’s a role that has certainly become less prominent.
And, in this case, I’d imagine that getting the breaking news details into a story, and getting it posted, is taking precedent over close examination (and questioning) of what’s being said by the authorities – which not only takes time, but requires that inquisitiveness, as well as being given rein by one’s editors and publishers to actually do that.
Fireworks have fuses.
And that makes sense in the context of a breaking news story (in which case it should be frames as “authorities have reported an explosion at Trump International Hotel…” or somesuch), but even as of today I see stories reporting an “explosion”, “detonation”, “high explosives”, and still claiming that the open bed of the truck somehow contained and directed the blast upward even though there is relatively little damage to even the baldachin and no blast damage to the entire windowed front of the building. So, they’ve had several days to do some minimal research and get the details at least marginally correct, and yet I’ve only seen a couple of stories actually correcting the misapprehension that the Cybertruck ‘contained’ the ‘explosion’ (which from the video of the event it quite obviously did not). Facts—even perhaps seemingly minor facts about technical issues—are important, as is not just parroting what authorities have said without question.
Yeah, all that is really needed is a flame or intense heat source. Inexpertly assembled pyrotechnic displays and fireworks stored together without appropriate separation are notorious for creating a propagating chain of initiation, which while not technically an explosion (and certainly not a detonation unless detonable explosives or compounds are present) can do a lot of damage.
I’m reluctant to describe any particular methods about which the suspect could have initiated the pyrotechnics and accelerants remotely (not because that information isn’t freely available on the internet but because of board rules), but I’ll note that a standard 9V battery that you put in your fire alarm is sufficient to ignite any number of commonly available conductive materials. It doesn’t take a Tony Stark to rig up something capable of this kind of event.
Stranger
I don’t disagree. But, as I imagine you’re well aware, actual investigation and true “journalism,” in the traditional sense, has largely been pushed out of many news organizations.
A deflagration is a subset of an explosion, making calling this an explosion perfectly cromulent.
Cite.