I don’t have this in mind myself, but I’d like to know: If, for example, someone wants to kill someone else with a poison like arsenic (compound) or strychnine, where do they get it? He/She can’t just walk into the local drugstore and ask for a pound of strychnine or whatever.
And I know there is a legal procedure to follow when one wants to buy a gun and ammunition.
Up until about 20 years ago strychnine was rat poison. You’d just go to the hardware store and get it. On old TV shows, wives that wanted to off their husbands would usually find it in the basement, out in the garage or under the sink.
In the USA, anyone can walk into a gun show and buy guns and ammunition, with no questions asked.
As someone who’s read a bunch of true crime novels and watched a lot of Forensic Files episodes, it seems that one common route has been people illicitly obtaining drugs and toxic substances from their workplace (health care facilities, laboratories and so on).
A lot of remedies they used to sell at drugstores that could be used for nefarious purposes are (as far as I know) out of fashion now (I don’t think you can head over to your local CVS for a big bottle of nux vomica).
Not quite “anyone”. In any event, the OP was not asking about guns.
Obviously the murder weapon people choose is influenced by what they can get their hands on. Some people already have guns. Some people have access to poisonous chemicals. People not in this happy situation can just use a lump hammer, which is available in any hardware store.
Yes he was:
And even if you can’t just walk into a gun show in your state, you can go to a show in another state, since most don’t require a check.
Back to poisons, strychnine might not be used as a rat poison any more, but warfarin is, and that can kill a human, too (in fact, it’s hard to imagine any poison that could kill a rat but not a human). It’s also available with a prescription, since in small doses it protects against heart disease, so you could give someone too many prescription pills at once.
Cyanide is used a lot by jewelers and metalsmiths. Wasn’t there some cult that set up a fake jewelry business to get cyanide for the mass suicide?
The answer is that almost nobody uses cyanide and strychnine anymore, probably because they are so hard to obtain.
Homicidal poisoning deaths in the United States 1999-2005.
523 poisonings from 1999-2005 or less than 100 a year. And “The most common type of poison used was medications.” On infants.
Isaac Asimov mentioned calomel, which is a medication but can kill; and its relative corrosive sublimate. Of this compound, Asimov said, “a little of that will kill you no matter how carefully you take it.”
Arsenic, strychnine and cyanide are surprisingly easy to obtain if you know who to ask and how to ask it. I am not going to provide further details.
Arsenic is a commonly use termiticide and cyanide salts have a range of uses including the aformentioned gold work and lab reagent. Strychnine and 1080 are still available as coyote/wild dog baits.
Warfarin is a really shitty way to poison someone. It is slow acting and the symptoms are really easy to diagnose and treatment almost up to the point of death is simple and reliable.
Similarly, obtaining a gun illegally (say, to avoid records that you bought it) is probably easier than most folks think.
Drug dealers carry cash, and can’t call the cops if you mug them. A lot of drug dealers therefore carry guns. Not all, but a lot. A drug dealer who doesn’t carry a gun most likely knows one who does.
So anybody who knows a drug dealer knows someone who either has an illegal gun or knows someone who does. And whomever has an illegal gun probably knows someone who sells them.
Even if you don’t know a drug dealer, ask yourself how hard it would be to find one. You probably know a good neighborhood to start asking around in. Eventually you find a dealer, and (for a fee, I assume) he’ll point you towards somebody who can sell you a gun.
Yet another fun side-effect of widespread use of illicit drugs: it isn’t all that hard to find a professional criminal when you need one. 
In the movies, they always kill the victim by overdosing them on heroin and they plant a small stash of the drugs on them. This doesn’t sound like it would be all that hard to pull off - Bill Cosby them, then while they are out of it, set up the scene, inject a syringeful of heroin, and rub the decedent’s hands all over over the heroin paraphernalia.
If the roofies are a mix of commonly abused prescription drugs and alcohol, presumably the authorities would just say “heroin, alcohol, and oxycontin. What a shame, what a shame. Drugs are bad, just say no, our work here is done…”
On the other side of the equation, I wonder how you would go about solving a homicide like this. Before you can even dedicate resources to it, you have to make sure it wasn’t an accidental drug overdose - maybe you could tell by the lack of long term liver damage from persistent uses of illegal drugs?
They just had some cases fairly recently where people were buying cyanide on Amazon, they really do have everything!:rolleyes: Apparently one girl ordered some in order to commit suicide and she was successful.
I guess she got what she needed on her free trial of Amazon Prime and never had to pay for the subscription…
Methomyl is a common pesticide
Tastes like table salt.
This article found in the references of the Wikipedia article says that it turns bright blue and gives off a fishy odor when it dissolves in liquid.
Cyanide is used in mining and manufacturing processes. Gold and silver mines are probably the most prevalent use of it. It’s also found in apple seeds and cherry pits. If you’re determined, you can get some.
Obtaining a fatal dose of the stuff is part of the plot of Irrational Man. Clearly, it’s on a lot of people’s minds.
In any kitchen on the planet there are several types of knives and other utensils which can kill. Many tool boxes also have things like hammers, saws, pick axes, knieves and nails. Easily available and commonly found in house sports equipment, like baseball and cricket bats, hockey stick, icepicks etc have also been used as lethal weapons.
Dealers at gun shows in any state must still comply with all the same laws as when selling from their shops. Same forms, same background check, same everything. You might be able to find a private citizen at a show who is willing to sell you a gun with no questions asked, but you didn’t make it clear if that was what you meant.
We’ve had several threads on this before. You can routinely find private citizens willing to do it, you can also find dealers who have 2 separate piles of guns on their table - a shop collection and their “personal” collection. You can buy from the dealer’s personal gun collection without any paperwork. Not sure if that is legal or not.
Also, apparently the number of guns allowed to be in your personal collection isn’t limited. I’m not quite sure how the ATF determines if someone is actually a dealer or just a really active collector…