Let me tell you my background here as it is clear you are also an ignorant of where I’m coming from.
I did not mind the NRA, until recently. In reality my record of supporting the second amendment is already here in the SDMB, unfortunately the latest unpleasantness with the mass murderers was like a rock that was turned over and very unpleasant things came crawling out.
Starting with the reports that the NRA has pressured lawmakers to not allow the ATF, and scientific organizations to study the issue scientifically if it lead to gun control. Then I found about the retarded experts that the NRA used against the scientists in the field in the lead in bullets for hunting in California, and then you can see that yeah, one should then not take the NRA’s Schrodinger’s word on the current progress seen with taggants, particularly when the opposition to taggants is relying on 15 year old science and a total ignorance of new developments.
Well, we have to see if the NRA decides to give political cover to their congress critters just to **approve **to begin to study that.
Where I see the joke is with people that do not ever notice when an organization never corrects a whooper like the lead used in bullets for hunting.
An organization that never corrects a falsehood like that one does point to a source of information that is poisoned. One has to clean their wells of information, it is like Nate Silver and how he got to be so good at analyzing polls, he cleaned is sources of information, even personally denouncing and destroying pollsters that were hired by the Daily Kos, to be the best at this one has to dismiss sources that never correct nor check if science has marched on.
So you now agree that the NRA has neither discouraged nor encouraged taggant legislation since 1999.
Good.
Now let’s talk a bit more about the technique that actually solved the fucking case: video surveillance.
The ACLU, in both national and various state chapters, has consistently come out against the deployment of video surveillance cameras. Cites on request.
Yet according to the charging document, the bombers were almost immediately identified by footage taken from various surveillance cameras (paragraphs 9-15). In addition, the carjacking victim’s ride by the bombers was also captured by video cameras (paragraph 23).
Why aren’t we excoriating the ACLU for fighting against video cameras, when discussing a case in which video cameras quickly produced photographic evidence of the bombers?
So the NRA contributes a miniscule amount of money to congressional campaigns. They spend most of their money in direct spending, exercising their first amendment right o free speech. So now you aren’t just against the second amendment, youa re also against the first amendment?
I have no particular love for the NRA and I think they shot themselves in the foot by letting Wayne LaPierre make that Newtown speech, but the anti-gun folks responded by shooting themselves in the dick.
The NRA might be fighting stupid with more stupid (probably because it seems to work) but their lobbying efforts are what we call free speech in this country. They’re allowed to do it no matter how much other people don’t like them doing it.
I think its disingenuous when people think the labor unions (with millions of voting dues paying members) have liberal politicians “paid off” and I think its just as disingenuous when people think that the NRA with millions of voting dues paying members (where membership is ENTIRELY optional unlike some unions (and I am strongly pro-union)) have pro-gun politicians “paid off”
Most high explosives are pretty difficult to detonate, requiring a high rate initiator like a blasting cap.
Gunpowder, especially black powder is fairly easy to touch off.
The most common tagging technology is plastic particles with a layered color code. Plastics are electrical insulators. Moving insulators around, especially flowing them through tubes and such, is a great way to produce static electricity, a fact I was reminded of as I kept getting zapped while vacuuming leaves last night. Gunpowder manufacturers are understandably leery about introducing such a foreseeable hazard into their manufacturing process. In spite of taking every possible precaution, they still suffer from explosions every two or three decades. These concerns are termed a red herring by tagging proponents.
Really though, the best argument is to encourage bombers to use gun powder. It is crap as explosives go. Not much consolation to the loved ones of three that died in Boston, but good news for the 300 or more that would have died if the same weight of simtex or even ANFO had been used instead.
I suppose we should also pass laws that bombers have to add taggants when they make their own explosives as the OK city guys did, or report the taggants contained in explosives they steal.
Wrong Mr. shoot in the dick guy, I did not said that, in fact if you read it again what I said was that I think the NRA should use their power of speech to give permission to their reps to do the right thing. Indeed, if I requested that they do not use their first speech rights I would had said that, I’m only saying that they are depending on rotten science and their refusal to look at science in this case that needs condemnation.
Good thing that I did not talk about what you are misrepresenting here, so nice shooting Tex.
Good for a Schrodinger point, meaningless when in reality is done to avoid the rest of what I’m saying. What we need if someone to clarify with the NRA about what if they are stuck in the 90’s with this.
As for video surveillance, I’m not really opposed to it, I was pointing out that it is not only the left who has a beef with it, but many on the right also have a beef with it:
Ran out of edit time, what I was trying to say is that what you said is a good Schrodinger point, meaningless when in reality is done to avoid the rest of what I’m saying.
What we need is someone to clarify with the NRA (and I think a member is better placed to find the info) about what they are looking at now or if they are stuck in the 90’s.
Have you ever wondered who it was that dug up this old taggant issue? What was their agenda? Was it to blame the NRA for something in an attempt to reduce it’s effectiveness as a 2nd Amendment supporter?
Is it possible to add taggants to black powder and smokeless propellant without affecting the accuracy of firearms? Consistancy is the key to accuracy. If every round leaves the barrel at 2800 fps, your groups will be much smaller than if muzzel velocity varied somewhere between 2600 and 3000 fps. Will fireworks loads climb to 500 or 1000 feet when it’s expected to or should the crew just hit the igniter and hope for the best?
Will the taggants survive in a high pressure/high heat environment? Current SAAMI “proof” (overload) load limits max out at 93,000 psi (for a very short duration). And it gets pretty darn hot inside the chamber and barrel.
Your guess is as good as any as to what a future taggant might be made of but I doubt the taggant will be an identical match for the black powder/smokeless propellants weight, mass, color or shape. If the taggant is different then it can be filtered out. If it can be easily seperated out, then there is no point in adding them in order to assist police to identify the propellant. There won’t be any taggants.
Black powder is easy. Mix charcoal (carbon), saltpeter (potassium nitrate as an oxidizer), and sulfur at the proper ratio, dampen with water and press into a cake. Break up the dry cake and viola - a stable, corned black powder. The larger grains burn slower than smaller grains.
Smokeless propellants are a wee bit more complicated. They all start out as either single-base (nitrocellulose) or double-base (nitrocellulose and nitroglycerine). Graphite is added to the sticky, greenish-yellow product to make it easier to handle. Don’t want your tooling to end up covered with a highly flamable coating. Manufacturers then form the mixture into different shapes to control it’s burn rates. Flake (similar to a flat sheet of paper), cylindrical/stick (similar to a rolled up sheet of paper, and ball (similar to a sheet of paper rolled into a tight ball). If you were to place all three sheets of paper into a 451 deg F oven, the flake will be completely consumed first, followed by the stick, and then the ball. Each sheet would produce the same amout of gas but produced over a longer time period. Select the shape that best matches your intended burn rate.
Manufactuers also add temporary “fire-proofing” coats to their powders to further control burn rates. Burn rates are everything when it comes to safely launching a bullet down a barrel. An uneven rate could cause the bullet to be too slow to release from the case, or to stick in the forcing cone, or to become stuck in the barrel. A proverbial cork-in-a-bottle. Gas pressure can continue to build until some part suffers a catastrophic failure. That’ll ruin your whole day.
Will your added taggants effect burn rates? Will taggant settling cause taggants to congregate around the ignition hole reducing the burn rate or causing a hang-fire or misfire? Will the taggants cause the powder to breakdown or otherwise become unstable?
Is adding taggants a good idea? Not if they cause safety problems or can easily be removed.
You mention how old the articles are that you’ve found. You blame the NRA for stopping research. That’s absurd. You, or any company can research taggants on their own dime, not the taxpayers. If there was money to be made, someone would attempt to overcome the inherent problems.
What is preventing you from doing your own taggant research? You keep blaming the NRA. I doubt they even know you exist. How is the NRA prventing you from starting your own taggant research?
Okay, this is getting to be a little embarrassing. Let me try to help you from continuing to make such an ass of yourself.
The CDC is the home of the Office of Noncommunicable Diseases, Injury and Environmental Health (ONDIEH) which in turn houses the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (NCIPC).
See that word - “Injury”? It is very much the mission of the CDC to understand and work to prevent injuries. You may have seen their work on Traumatic Brain Injuries. In fact, you may have noticed that when the NRA got Congress to stop funding firearms injuries, they shifted the money to Traumatic Brain Injuries.
You don’t consider Traumatic Brain Injuries to be a “disease” do you? When they provide evidence for the effectiveness of children’s bicycle helmets, is that “disease” prevention?
How about “motor vehicle injuries”? Is that a “disease”?
How about their work on violence prevention? Is that a disease?
So, when they include injuries due to firearms, do you see how that falls within their purview?
Nobody is claiming that firearm use is a disease. They are claiming that the CDCs mission is to understand and reduce the number of injuries and deaths that people experience.
This is a very dumb point because there are things that benefit society that do not have good enough profit margins and have to be subsidized, like many vaccines.
Once again, history shows how the NRA supported members in congress stop research, only when there is permission from the NRA is that then the politicians can do the right thing. It is really naive to keep on hammering that it is easy or profitable to do research that is not supported by government on several items that benefit the population, once again many vaccines fit into this situation.
Faculty at the University of Maine got some cash from NSF in 2009 to do research, so it is not impossible to get government funded research into taggants:
I was the one that posted that already, but thanks for paying attention. most of the ones in favor of the NRA misrepresented what the scientists were saying in that piece so I wonder why you think it helps them here.
Once again, there is research being done, but the problem is the **deployment **and development of the new technology, funding for research is in any case scarce under the current conditions; so far the ones in favor of the NRA can only point to them as being stuck in 90’s research and another point of why I posted that cite early was to show the forced ignorance the NRA is showing regarding new technology.
Some posters seem to be implying that the NRA has stifled research. I decided to do a simple Google search and I found that NSF had given $400k to the University of Main to research taggants.
As to surveillance cameras, well, first, what do we mean by “surveillance”? Do we mean simply the observance of a public street, or an intrusion into the privacy of a mature gentleman who hasn’t committed a Federal crime in years? Until we fully explore the meaning of that word, especially as it used in case law, I don’t know how we can proceed…
The idea gives me the Orwell Dread, but if it is nothing more than observing a public domain, I can’t see any real harm to it. Except for creeping me out.
most of the ones in favor of the NRA misrepresented what the scientists were saying in that piece so I wonder why you think it helps them here.