This is the deal. You don’t have to make something impossible to get less of it; all you have to do is make it harder or more costly.
This is an across-the-board principle, applicable to pretty much any human endeavor. If you make people wait in line for an hour to vote, they can still vote. But you will get less voting. If you have people who want to make untraceable bombs, you’re going to get fewer of them actually making bombs if they need to mix the stuff up themselves, even if it’s easy, than if they can buy it off the shelf. And if it requires a certain amount of practice to get good at mixing the ingredients just right, then it’ll reduce the number still further.
Not doing something that’ll reduce the incidence or likelihood of a particular threat because it won’t get rid of the threat entirely is stupid. But count on Bricker to be stupid. He’s the SDMB’s version of Antonin Scalia.
BTW, what the heck is the NRA’s supposed interest in this? Do they believe the right to bear arms goes beyond sidearms and extends to the right to make bombs?
That’s correct, and so is Cal. Gunpowder (black powder) is not a chemical, it has a physical structure and has to be manufactured properly to be useful as an explosive. An amateur can mix the chemicals and produce something good enough to make a small rocket, that mix would not combust under pressure as readily as true powder.
Also, it doesn’t matter, the taggants should be put in the potassium nitrate. Of course I know how to make potassium nitrate, instructions can be found on the internet too, people have been doing it for a long time. So you can’t stop everyone, and it may do no good to track down a suicide bomber with taggants, but that’s not the purpose of laws and regulations. The idea is to make it more difficult to build bombs, and to have a better chance of identifying the bomb maker should they do so anyway.
Similarly, instructions for making an atomic bomb are available on the Internet, and were available for many years before the Internet. So there’s no point in trying to keep Iran from building a nuke.
In addition to reloading which has already been mentioned, lots of people use muzzle loaders. I see as many hunters if not more in the woods now during muzzle loading season as I do during rifle season.
Taggants based on minute quantities of rare isotopic combinations would be really easy to pick out out of any background noise. It would be even easier since they have samples of combustion products from the gunpowder itself. Even if the specific taggant can’t be narrowed to a specific lot number, it would easily narrow the possible sources. It takes very little sample and below ppt concentrations for a mass spec to pick out.
I cannot agree with this line of reasoning. Making things somewhat more difficult will keep the people who aren’t all that interested in doing something from doing it. It will not keep the extremists, who are devoted to their ideals from doing it. In fact, that’s the whole reason that the longer lines was supposed to work at all. If it stopped everyone equally, it would provide no advantage to either major candidate.
In this case, the only way it would seem to stop someone would be if they only marginally wanted to build a bomb and kill people. I think it’s highly unlikely that the sort of people that would be motivated to build a bomb and blow it up at a public event now would be any less deterred by making it a little more difficult to make it traceable. Hell, it seems a majority of the time, these sorts of events either they just plain don’t care, or they want people to know. Admittedly, in this case, it seems that the person or person involved didn’t want their identity known, but it also doesn’t appear that they were that interested in a high quality bomb, based on how it was apparently constructed. Regardless, the sort of people who do this are not normal people and trying to apply that sort of logic to their motivations just isn’t reasonable.
There’s just a bit of difference between having information available and having a specifically identified threat. It’s also easy to make drugs using cough medicine and other easily available chemicals. Trying to find a meth lab by tracking everyone that buys cough medicine is just about as silly. Yes, it makes sense to try to stop Iran from building a bomb but, in this analogy, that’s like trying to stop a known drug dealer from going into his local pharmacy and buying 50 bottles of cough medicine.
It’s just not the same to try to stop someone who from making two small crudely constructed bombs as trying to stop a state from obtaining the materials to build a nuclear weapon.
Beats me. I mean, shouting out a “huzzah!” to an objection that, to any mathematically literate person, is obvious nonsense serves no purpose but to make the huzzaher look foolish.
But is it really worth the effort? I mean, we’re having knee-jerk reactions to the Boston events, without really stopping to consider what these reactions might actually entail.
Potassium nitrate and sulfur are both extremely common chemicals- so much so that they’re produced in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions of tons. It’s primarily used as a fertilizer, but is also used in toothpastes, meat curing, cigarettes, power generation, metal treatment, stump removing, food ingredient and other uses.
Any sort of taggant would have to be acceptable enough to be used in any and all of those applications, and would have to be specific enough to be usefully trackable.
All this effort and expense because of two bombs that used blackpowder.
It just doesn’t seem like a useful application of the force of law in this case- it’s appealing to fearmongering and not actually solving a real problem.
True. Very true. I’ve tried it myself. It’s very difficult and time-consuming to make powder that’s quick enough for, say, a black powder rifle.
But for a bomb? That’s the easiest thing to use gunpowder for. A container packed with poor quality gunpowder will still blow up just fine.
What I’m seeing here is the usual collection of people who are terrified of anything related to guns, and who don’t know the first thing about guns or gunpowder, signing on to a proposal that would do very little under the theory that it’s better to try something because at least you’re trying.
I doubt there are any significant costs or effects from the taggants based on earlier discussions of this. If there are, then a cost/benefit analysis is due.
There is an entire community – not, perhaps, inhabited by too many liberals – who are interested in muzzle-loaded firearms. These firearms use black powder.
But NOT similarly, an atomic bomb cannot be made from sulfur, potassium nitrate, charcoal, and a mortal and pestle. Nor can it be made from ingredients which are anywhere near as common as those are.
So one of these things, as Sesame Street taught the day you were absent, is not like the other.