Was dynamite ever available for purchase at farm stores or hardware stores?

[Stranger_On_A_Train]

@usedtobe

Story was that one could buy long arms - including the Thompson sub-machine gun - at hardware stores.

Don’t know if the Prohibition gangsters’ unseemly use of them got that changed, or if the change came later.

While not as handy as dynamite, the “fertilizer bomb” (Oklahoma City Federal Building) is well known to farm kids. Don’t know if it would be practical for a foundation.

Since mining still uses high explosives (it still does, doesn’t it?), there have to be people and ways to detonate it. Maybe there are specialty businesses which can be called.

I bought a Ruger 10/22 (common semi-automatic .22 LR carbine) from a hardware store circa 1992. Most hardware stores no longer maintain Federal Firearms License to sell firearms, but many in rural areas sell ammunition and accessories.

ANFO (ammonium nitrate soaked in fuel oil) can be made to detonate, but requires a substantial impulse. When I worked for a powder monkey we would blast duck ponds and irrigation canals by digging holes and burying 5 gallon containers of ANFO with a stick of high grade (85% TNT equiv) dynamite. Unless the ammonium nitrate is processed into a fine slurry, commercial blasting caps alone will not detonate it.

Commercial mining operations today generally used Seismopac, Tovex, or Emulex (water-gel explosives) due to their mechanical and thermal insensitivity and ease of deployment. High grade explosives (RDX and HMX based plastique) is really only used for building demolition, aviation/aerospace ordnance functional and termination systems, and for law enforcement and military use.

@nevadaexile

Frankly, getting explosives or fabricating them yourself really isn’t that difficult. Almost all mines have a magazine where they store explosives and most are guarded by a single person who is more concerned about the heavy equipment being stolen. And since the 1960s publishers like Paladin Press and Loompanics have published and sold dozens of books teaching people how to create homemade explosives and detonators.

While it was once true that explosive safety was lax in the mining industry, since 9/11, the BATFE has taken explosive security extremely seriously, and all commercial companies handling explosives are regularly audited, with even small infractions like the loss of a single 200 ft reel of Primacord costing hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines.

The crap published by Paladin and Loompanics is far more dangerous to the reader, lacking as it does basic safety and handling information, and often containing wrong instructions for making explosives and other hazardous devices. Of particular concern is The Poor Man’s James Bond series and the CIA Black Books, which provide information on improvised devices likely to blow up in the user’s face. On the other hand, any graduate with a chemistry or chemical engineering degree with access to chemistry journals probably has enough practical knowledge to make any of of a wide array of explosives and toxins with relative safety. But they would-be survivalist with his library of “How to Blow Shit Up” books? Make sure you live well away and upwind of his domicile.

Stranger