If you can add taggants to black powder or propellants, someone else can remove them. All that time and effort and the powder still couldn’t be traced. Visual inspection, a magnet, metal detector, using various light wave lengths, a scale, etc.. It just depends on what taggant(s) are used.
It’s also dangerous to add taggants to gunpowders. Taggants alter the burn rates of the powders, especially under the high psi of firearm cartridges.
Bombers only need to exceed the fracture strength of their pressure cooker/pipe bombs. A poor grade of black powder would serve their crazy azz purpose.
What’s the point of adding taggants for identifcation purposes if those taggants can easily be removed? You still end up with powder that can’t be identified.
When referring to the acceptable quantity of unsolved murder cases as an argument for mandatory taggants, I’m unsure how you can keep aside the issue of how any such cases the proposed policy would help solve. Were that number zero then appealing to unsolved cases feels pointless to me; if nonzero but sufficiently small, then we should discuss cost/benefit tradeoffs rather than emotively appealing to the aggregate quantity of unsolved murder cases.
No fallacy. Those are the only cases where adding the taggent would matter. If the murder case can be solved using other clues, then adding the taggent provided no additional law enforcement benefit.
I was previously looking at this as a deterrence policy, but I suspect you’re right; some people will accept the risk of identification and use commercial, tagged gunpowder, facilitating their eventual capture. I do see at least one possible confounding issue: those who accept the risk (or who aren’t aware of the risk) are likely to be less careful in ways that could make apprehending them easier anyway. I’d definitely be interested in reading a detailed cost/benefit analysis should one exist.
(Anyway, I very much doubt that taggants would be an effective deterrent. To be so deterred an individual would have to be willing to construct and plant a bomb, but not willing enough to make use of a few hours and a $70 ball grinder. Such attacks are so rare that the other costs must be quite high — taggants feel trivial in comparison.)
I dunno, less than a million? I’m not really being facetious. At some point it becomes an epidemic and throwing everything at a problem is all you can do, but if a policy costs 10 trillion dollars and saves one life we’re probably doing it wrong. The rest needs a cost/benefit analysis.
You’re really having trouble with identifying rather than evading the central issue, aren’t you? What are the costs and benefits of a human life? Or of a murderer going free?
Your choice of username does suggest a difficulty with more esoteric concepts such as morality or society or responsibility, one must notice.
Hey, I can tell you what you’re thinking too. You look in the mirror and see Antonin Scalia as he used to be, back when he could actually think. The rest of us look at you and see Antonin Scalia as the loudmouthed bozo he is now.
That’s a point of contention, as I’m sure you’re aware, but one could go about it any number of ways. At a rough and terribly simple first pass, you could assess the cost of a murderer going free as some combination of: the additional damage he’d cause while free; the cost of police resources in a continued search; the economic value of justice to the citizenry (such as how much people would be willing to pay for a murderer to be locked up). This sort of literature feels a little ad hoc, I readily admit, but without any metrics we’re lost — we have no context for making judgments.
You mean my username, which openly mocks followers of Ayn Rand? Are you capable of contributing to a discussion which is not openly, snidely hostile of anyone with whom you disagree? Grow a soul, asshole.
I don’t believe it servers any useful purpose to chastise usernames (especially after an elvis impersonator has been detained for sending ricin to Congress and the Whitehouse). :rolleyes:
These bombers intended to injure and murder as many people as possible. That was their primary objective. I’m sure they believed they had legitimate reasons for doing so but they’re crazy so their reasons are suspect.
They had many options for delivering death and destruction. They chose to use pressure cooker pipe bombs but could just have easily driven a truck down the sidewalk or mixed some kind of posionous gas and released it into the crowd. Maybe fertilizer and fuel oil? That doesn’t have taggants in it.
Pick one and do it, for once. You’ve been insistent on dismissing any such esoteric concept as morality as relevant to the discussion, but only, Randianly, insisting on some sort of cold cost-benefit analysis instead. Well, do it then. Cut the crap and stand for something, for once in your life.
Someone who acts like one is now claiming to *mock *them? Srsly?
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I think that’s the closest comparison we have. Would adding taggants be significantly more expensive than the machinery that etches serial numbers onto firearms? Would tracking taggants by lot, location, and buyer be significantly more challenging than doing the same with serial numbers? Would removing taggants be significantly easier than irreparably defacing a firearm serial number?
It also presumes the “individuals on the margin” are aware that taggants are, or may be, present, in whatever gunpowder they purchase (as opposed to steal).
What the hell? You’re being incoherent. What does this have to do with me taking a stand on something? Are you suggesting that I form an opinion about the policy in question, despite not knowing how much it’d cost or how effective it’d be? Or what?
Where in the world did you get that idea? Nowhere did I dismiss morality — frankly, in my view it’d be immoral to implement a policy without determining whether its effects are likely to outweigh its costs (in the mind of those governed). Would you suggest that the government spend $10,000,000,000,000 to save the life of one cancer-ridden 90 year old with late-stage Alzheimers? If not, then you agree with me in principle. (Otherwise you’re insane.)
A follower of Rand wouldn’t be calling for cost/benefit analysis, he’d be saying that any such government intervention is wrong in principle.
Dude, if you think “we should try to understand as deeply as possible how we allocate our limited resources” is Rand-like, then I’m not sure what to think. You seem desperate for reasons to attack anyone who disagrees with you. Are you mentally unstable? My girlfriend is a psychiatric social worker, she may be able to find some resources in your area, recommend a therapist.
(I suppose I’m just amused that you understood the “Randroid” reference, but were unaware that it was coined as — and has remained for decades — a pejorative term.)
The answer to that is yes, by orders of magnitude. Think of the logistics involved in tracking every gunpowder, ammunition, and fireworks sale made in the US (most of which are not tracked right now).