And so it’s impossible to track the gunpowder in the Boston Marathon bombs.
Thanks, NRA, for freedom.
I don’t disagree that the NRA are assholes, but you are aware that gunpowder is relatively simple to make with readily available ingredients that many people may already have in their homes?
How much would it cost manufacturers to include the taggants and maintain the database? And how many bombings-by-gunpowder are there?
I don’t see it as worth the trouble.
Typical ignorance. Propose a solution that sounds good with no real idea of what value it might have.
How difficult is it to make gunpowder, RTFirefly? Hint: charcoal, sulfur, potassium nitrate.
Let’s ban fertilizer.
Ignorant goof.
Seems like good idea, but after a while, non-biodegradable taggants become useless as the environment become saturated with them. A well-intentioned yet impractical idea.
[impassioned liberal voice]
At least he’s trying something!
[/impassioned liberal voice]
Gee, Bricker, it is always illuminating when you demonstrate you really aren’t any smarter than everybody else.
AND thinking of the children. The children!
Actually, it’[s harder than most people realize. You don’t just mix together the appropriate proportions (quick-- what are they?) of the three basic ingredients, as a number of readily available references on the subject point out (despite what Captain Kirk did in that Star Trek episode). And if you’re trying to make it in quantity, the paper trail you’ll leave will heklp track the subjects down. Suklfur and charcoal are easy enough, but anyone buying large quantities of saltpeter is going to be suspicious.
The idea of taggants in commercially sold explosive materials has been proposed and supported for years (here, for instance: http://ota.fas.org/reports/8017.pdf ) and, yes, the taggants can be used even in such things as fertilizer. It’s essentially a good idea.
It’s unfortunate that our folks in Congress were completely unable to do anything about this.
Guano.
(This is simultaneously a comment on the accuracy of your idea and literally a natural source of potassium nitrate.)
And what’s the value of “quick?” I happen to know off the top of my head, 6:1:1 nitrate, charcoal, sulfur, and a mortar and pestle, but especially in this world, anyone who doesn’t know can learn the details in short order.
So let’s ban the Internet.
I nominate you to fight the Gorn in the upcoming invasion.
There are rational arguments against taggants. The preposterous notion that the environment could become “saturated” with them to the point that the residue from a bomb blast could not be distingushed from background noise is not one of them.
It’s not that hard; I made decent enough black powder as a 13 year old from information out of a 1954 World Book Encyclopedia to shoot a homemade rocket across the yard, and I suspect had I been brave/stupid enough to confine it, it would have blown up adequately.
Also, 2 lbs of potassium nitrate is about $11 on Amazon from any number of sellers. 10 lbs is $29. 25 lbs is $71.
Why is it preposterous?
Based on that article, I’m just not seeing the outrage here. Sure, making gun powder isn’t as simple as following a cupcake recipe, but it’s not exactly rocket science–well, I guess technically it is. Seriously, someone who is motivated to build bombs can find the appropriate information pretty easily on the internet, and the tools and materials are cheap and easy to obtain. Yes, someone buying large quantities of the materials would probably get noticed, but it doesn’t take a large amount to make the bombs that were used in Boston.
All I’m really seeing here is that IF commercial explosives are used to make a bomb then these MAY help. How many of these types of attacks use commercial explosvies vs. some time of homemade or improvised explosive?
And, yes, cost is an important factor. This would affect the cost of tons of legitimate use of explosives like ammunition, fireworks, construction/demolition, mining. I don’t know how much extra it would cost would be, but when we consider how much legitimate use there is and compare it to how useful it would be in these fairly rare cases, is that cost justified? If it ends up costing millions for these legitimate purposes, but doesn’t turn out to be as useful as claimed, or they don’t even use commercial explosives, that’s a huge waste.
Frankly, there’s a lot of stuff to be angry about with this bombing, but placing some blame on the NRA, just seems like misplaced rage to me.
It’s actually difficult to make * good * gunpowder. The Mythbusters tried it, and they came up with stuff that was distinctly inferior to the commercial stuff. And really, I’m not seeing a downside to making it harder and more complicated for people to make untraceable bombs.
I don’t like defending the NRA (mostly because their leadership consistently makes gun owners look bad) but it seems like the media is deliberately searching out ways to pit the NRA.
So they should have made silver fulminate bombs instead - a silver dime is a known weight of silver. I knew several people who made silver fulminate snappers to mess around with as teens. There are actually a fair number of kitchen chemistry explosives that are reasonably simple to make. Iodine and ammonia spring to mind, and as a non-explosive material you can cure fiberglass with an acid to make a nasty antipersonnel item.
Terrorism is easily accomplished still even with fertilizer tracked. [and for bombmaking, the gunpowder doesn’t have to be fine corned, that only helps to make it burn evenly. Compressed in a pressure cooker it just has to burn.]
For the same reason it’s preposterous to suggest that it’s impossible to identify a flood zone because there is some background amount of water everywhere on Earth. :rolleyes:
Just to add a few more orders of magnitude to the innumeracy of this suggestion, you do know that the concept of “taggant” implies a wide variety of them with subtly different information encoded therein, right? Thus, your suggestion would not only require that the background level of “taggants” over the surface of the Earth rise to equal that found in the aftermath of a bomb blast, but that the background level of each individual type of taggant would need to reach that level?
As I said, there are sensible arguments against the idea without dragging in arrant nonsense.