I personally have no objection to taggants if they can be demonstrated to not cost very much, because I don’t actually think they’d do very much.
I guess to me it boils down to what benefit is there. How many crimes are committed each year with gunpowder in which a taggant would help law enforcement solve the case? It’s only going to be a subset of crimes in which people used powder, because we can assume some crimes are solved very quickly based on a large amount of other evidence being available in the case. Then we have to ask what is the preventative value of the law. Basically how many people who were going to make a black powder bomb would be dissuaded by taggants.
That number would have to seem pretty small to me unless there are a lot more of these bombings going on. Even if it prevented 100% of them I’m not sure it’s more than a couple cases a decade, but I’d be willing to change my opinion given statistics to the contrary.
I have no objection to taggants either, at least in concept. the objection I do have is against people who don’t know shit about shit who act like you just sprinkle them into black/smokeless powder and everything is hunky-dory. as it is, if you use the wrong formulation/grain (e.g. using fast burning pistol powder in a rifle cartridge) you’ll be presented with a gun which will blow up in your face. so yeah, go ahead and mandate that taggants be put into smokeless powders, then tell manufacturers its on them to prove the addition of taggants is safe. oh, and make sure they can still be sued if it turns out not to be.
Wait, let me get this straight. You are arguing that if we make making a bomb just a bit harder, well,* people who are bent on bombing people will give up because it is too hard*?
That is fucking dumb.
People who are determined to blow shit up will find a way to blow shit up.
Bear in mind that prospective policy need only affect the behavior of individuals at the margin. That seems to be RTFirefly’s argument — a policy (such as adding taggants to gunpowder or its ingredients) needn’t be drastic or persuade every potential bomber. But it does require a sufficient number of people for whom the additional cost is persuasive.
I won’t put forth an opinion about who is (and is not) dumb, but I’m not sure that’s the case here: we’re talking about relatively small additional costs in the context of persuading potential bomb-planting terrorists. Surely such individuals could put in the necessary few hours to make their own gunpowder and may not even care that the gunpowder can traced at all.
To me, that is the key point. Unlike high explosives, black powder good enough for a bomb is trivially easy to make from easily-obtainable ingrediants and very safe to handle. I doubt anyone willing to put the effort into making a pipe bomb is going to be deterred if they decide they have to make the black powder from scratch.
As I’ve said I’d need to know the costs of this before I can say if I’d support it. I don’t have any immediate “moral” or “philosophical” qualms. But if it would actually substantially impact the physical properties of the powder such that well known guidelines would have to be changed, that alone suggests a cost that isn’t all that low. Which to me would necessitate some evidence that the benefit be at least more than marginal.
I’m seeing a lot of immediate reasons to suspect the benefit will not be significant:
-I’m not aware of a rash of black powder crimes/bombings, but will obviously change my tune if someone has statistics on this sort of thing to the contrary
-Some portion of bombers will not care that they get caught. For example Timothy McVeigh, while not exactly throwing himself to the police, didn’t particularly seem to expect he would get away with his bombing. Not all bombers believe they will bomb something and not get caught, and thus a taggant that just makes it easier for them to get caught is unlikely to dissuade them.
-For Islamic terrorists, there is a strong history of their front line guys not particularly caring if they get caught or killed. Additionally, they have lots of online communities and resources that teach their members how to build simple black powder bombs. It would stand to reason they could use those same resources to teach them how to make powder from raw materials. Even assuming they particularly care about getting caught. We are talking about people that fly planes into buildings and attempt to detonate bombs in planes in-flight. Not all of these people care if they get caught and some are happy to die during their attack.
Given the extreme sensitivity of modern analytical equipment only parts per trillion of a tag can’t needs to be left behind. It will cost next to nothing and have zero effect on the explosive. Gun powder is not manufactured in clean rooms. It is already relatively impure. Adding trace amounts of uncommon isotopes won’t effect the operation of anything.
Actually I would support a ban or at least more restrictions on artificial fertilizer. They have it banned in our state on school grounds for K to 8. There is a such thing as “natural fertilizer” which our family uses, and our family strongly believes against pesticides and artificial fertilizer. We have been doing everything in our lawn naturally for years now.
As for fluoride, we actually filter out all the fluoride in our water and use non-fluoride toothpaste. This because we don’t believe in fluoride either.
Guy wants to build a bomb.
He goes out and buys 10 1Lb containers of gunpowder of 10 different brands, mixes them together and add 10 lbs of untagged homemade gunpowder to the mix.
He makes a 20LB bomb ( or two 10s if you prefer)
He plants it/them at an East Coast Navy base and sets it/them off.
Since it was a Navy base they call in Gibbs and the NCIS crew.
Here is the scene that takes place in the lab:
Gibbs: Whatca got Abby?
Abby: Beats the shit out of me, all the taggents are all mixed up, like there was a bunch of different gunpowders used.
G: Call you tell where any of them were purchased?
A: Nope, not a fucking clue boss.
For taggants to help in an investigation, you will have to put a serial number on every can of powder made. So a $20 can of 1 lb of powder will have to have its own taggants, tied to a serial number. When I purchase it, you will have to tie that serial number and the unique taggants to my unique identifier and have that stored in a system someplace.
Then we have to hope that there isn’t a way to pollute the area with other taggants somehow (if I were a criminal mastermind, I would try to mix as many different sets as I could, and possibly make my bombs by pulling powder from shotgun and rifle ammo).
So:
Database issues
Tracking issues
Reporting issues
Potential impact on safety
All in exchange for MAYBE being useful in the future.
I would rather put more money into surveillance tech (and I hate the big brother cameras everywhere).
I’m going to guess that taggants are neither as useful as supporters think they are nor as detrimental as people who are against them make them out to be. Exact tracking to a specific buyer is unlikely. Loading tables can always be updated if needed. So the question I would ask is this: Do people who work in the field of explosive event investigations see taggants as a useful in performing their job? Even if black powder can be home brewed without taggants, if commercial powders did have taggants then the presence or absence of taggants is in itself a useful bit of information. It doesn’t have to be a magic bullet that directly identifies a bomber, just one of the clues that points investigators in the right direction.
Yes, they are unstable. Particularly that LaPierre guy. If someone is telling you that tagants are unstable, the answer is simply to choose stable ones. All you want is a trace isotopic signal, not a specific compound.
This taggants thing sounds like a complicated issue. Before I make up my mind on where I stand, I am going to have to review the full list of remarks made by both Hitler and Lenin on the subject.
