:rolleyes: so using a pressure cooker (a container which can be sealed) instead of capped pipe (a container which can be sealed) is actually novel enough to you to justify yet another moral panic?
I don’t consider adding taggants to gunpowder to be a panic. I consider it prudent. I think it would be useful in many crimes other than terrorism.
Such as?
I hope you’re not serious. A pipe is a pressure cooker without a valve. Any container that can be clamped shut so as to retain the rapidly expanding gas from the explosion inside it is suitable for a bomb. There is no innovation here.
What irritates me greatly about your tone is your clearly have little or no knowledge on the subject, but are confident that what was new to you is some kind of useful data point.
But you don’t have the slightest clue how many crimes are committed with black powder?
On what do you base your idea?
And just for comparison’s sake, where do you stand on deployment of surveillance video cameras – you know, the tool that actually IDENTIFIED the bombers and which the ACLU has steadfastly urged us to oppose?
he doesn’t know. he’s just saying “It’ll help because I say it’ll help.”
here’s the thing- black powder is sold over-the-counter. And as it is, there’s only one manufacturer of black powder in this country worth discussing, and that’s Hodgdon. So yeah, great, your putative taggant says the device was loaded with Hodgdon black powder. That’s really going to narrow it down.
They dont really care. It is an ideological expansion of gun debate partisanship.
I don’t know and neither do you. If it were ideological partisanship I wouldn’t have looked up the cost of Calcium isotopes to estimate a cost for my labeling scheme then come back to report that calcium isotopes are too costly. I see very little honest discussion from the other side. Given that the NRA has successfully prevented something as obvious as background checks, I don’t expect an honest discussion either. so it is not terribly suprising that the best you can do is claim partisanship.
As far as I’m concerned, this one crime warrants extensive investigation to prevent further attacks. That alone makes tagging gunpowder worth a 1% increase in the price of gunpowder.
I would remind you that you are speaking to a person who personally witnessed the LA riots. His expertise is not subject to challenge.
you haven’t demonstrated that. At all. you seem to be under the illusion that “tagging” gunpowder will let someone swab a surface, then Abby from the crime lab will cross-reference and triangulate some stuff and determine that the powder was bought from some local sporting-goods store at 2:13 p.m. on the second tuesday of last week. given my previous post (which you conveniently seem to have ignored) adding a taggant to black powder would do little more than identify it as black powder. Which is not very significant since black powder burns very “dirty,” leaving sulfurous charcoal residue all over the place. If your forensics people need a taggant in order to tell if it was black powder, they should be fired for incompetence.
Not many make their own gunpowder…
Stop and think about the world we live in. Facebook knows what kind of underwear I buy. A growing number of products in the grocery store have unique RFID tags which allow a specific bottle of aspirin to be tracked from the plant that made it all the way to the checkout counter, like a FedEx package.
If the NRA would allow it, the technology exists to uniquely tag, at low cost, the contents of each container of Hodgdon black powder, and record who it is sold to (the retailer already does, if you buy it with a bank card). Malicious use of black powder (thousands of pipe bombs are constructed every year) would point directly to the purchaser, at a point in an investigation where time is of the essence. Of course for legal users of black powder, the government could also tell where you bought the black powder that you used to shoot your elk during muzzleloader season.
facebook doesn’t know anything about me.
I don’t think you understand what we’re talking about when we discuss “taggants.” A taggant, in this context, is a chemical marker added to a combustible or explosive compound that can be detected in the residue left after it’s burned or detonated. it has to be added into the compound itself when it’s manufactured. It’s not a label or RFID tag stuck on the can. the idea is that if someone pulls a stunt like Boston, forensics could check any residue left by the devices for specific taggant compounds and trace where it came from. Problem with gunpowder is that (AFAIK) there’s no “chain of custody” once it leaves the manufacturer. so tagging gunpowder is not likely to tell you anything more than who made it, and since there are only a few manufacturers (at least in this country) it isn’t going to really give any useful information.
Taggants that have been added to bulk black powder can be located and removed. The taggants don’t look, smell, weigh, or feel like black powder. It would be no more difficult to remove plastic(?) or metal(?) taggants than it would be to seperate the rasins out of your Rasin Bran. Screens are commonly used to seperate black powder by size but other methods could be used depending on what the taggants are made of.
Sporting grades of black powder are available in several sizes. The mixture would be the same but the larger sizes would burn more slowly than the smaller sizes:
Cannon 4.76-1.68 mm
1FG 1.68-1.19
2FG 1.19-0.59
3FG .84-.29
4FG .42-.15
5FG .149
Screens could be used to sift out the taggants or the black powder could be ground to a smaller size than the taggants. Either way, the taggants can be remove.
You might be able to use a solvent? Float the taggants or float the black powder? The point is that the taggants could be removed. All the time and money spent to add taggants for identification purposes would be a waste of time.
Why is burn rate important? Whether you’re making fireworks or loading your wheel lock muzzle loader, slower burning powder is used to lift heavier projectiles. Safely. Solid particles of black powder burns in nanoseconds to become a gas. If the projectile doesn’t move down the barrel, moves too slowly, or stops moving for whatever reason, the gas pressure will continue to build until it exceeds the structural strength of it’s container. Boom!
Crazy-azz bombers don’t care what the safe limits are because their intention is to injure and kill as many people as possible. They’re intention is to overload the pressure limits of the pressure cooker/pipe bomb. If black powder isn’t available, they’ll use something else.
Then why are you on facebook?
Are you suggesting that bombers, firework shows, and hunters/target shooters load RFID chips along with their black powder charges and fire them?
What “technology” exists that couldn’t be defeated? Specifically. You obviously want to blame the NRA for something (anything?) but I’m unaware of whatever “technology” you are referring to? Could you clear up the confusion and assist in the fight against ignorance? Please?
We seen to have two different streams of thought from Team No. One is that taggants are expensive and/or impractical. If this were accompanied by suggestions for more practical and economic means to trace gunpowder sales, that would be one worthy point of view.
But if the point of the exercise is to demonstrate that “gun grabbers” are foolish and thoughtless people, that is quite another, it seems to me.
My POV, for what it’s worth, is that taggants are impractical - which is OK, because who cares about tracing gunpowder sales? What we care about is catching criminals. We’d get better results by installing more security cameras and/or hiring more police and FBI agents, and for probably a good deal less money than a taggant registry would cost
Why does everyone always want to jump immediately to high-tech CSI/science fiction type solutions of questionable value rather than improving lower tech tried and true approaches which have actually been shown to work?
I personally don’t give a shit about tagging black powder. It doesn’t affect me but I see it as an attempt to paint the NRA as evil and gun owners as evil by association.
I don’t think you have established that tagging black powder has met the cost benefit hurdle. Unless your hurdle is that there is some theoretical situation where it might be useful one day. I mean you do realize that they found the bombers without any of that tagging technology right? You do realize that you can make home made gunpowder that is good enough for home made bombs right? You can readily find the formula and process on the internet. What purpose does it serve to tag black powder unless you can make enough unique tags to narrow down point of purchase to a handful of stores. And then what if those purchases were made in cash.
I know it stings to know that the anti-gun side has lost what may be a once ina generation debate on gun control because of your obstinate refusal to acknowledge the facts but you don’t expect things to be any different next time if your side continues to be so ignorant and obstinate. The L A riots may not seem like a significant data point to you but it was at least one example where all your reassurances of how the police is going to be able to provide all the security we need proved false. So how much suffering and sacrifice are you willing to subject your (or anyone else’s) family to so that an arsonist or looter doesn’t have to fear being shot during a riot?
I think the first might be evidence of the second. Why do we need a practical and economic means of tracing gunpowder sales to the point that we can identify who bought any particular bottle of gun powder? What costs are we saving, what horrible events are we preventing by making commercially available gun powder available? You would be better off trying to make a hat that would make you immune to lightning bolts.
This is a good point. Money spent elsewhere would do a lot more good than this taggant system. Cameras are highly effective at solving and preventing crime.
oh bullshit. I don’t have to offer an alternative in order to point out that tagging gunpowder is impractical. In fact, I’m not offering an alternative because I don’t think one is necessary.
whatever. we have people in this thread advocating “tagging” of gunpowder who clearly don’t even know what the fuck tagging is. that’s just plain ignorance, and an ignorant opinion is worthless.
There is no need for any alternative. The number of crimes committed with black powder is statistically so small as to be utterly meaningless.
Tagging high explosives makes sense, and I (and the NRA) have no problem with such programs.