That’s a culpably blatant mischaracterization. Prior to the commencement of our discussion, my points on this thread were twofold: 1) although it makes sense to consider behavior on the margin, it didn’t seem likely to me that taggants would have a significant deterrent effect on terroristic behavior; and 2) taggants could plausibly facilitate the capture of criminals, and I’d be interested in reading a thorough analysis.
That’s it. I’ll put it in simple terms that your petulant tantrum-prone monkey brain can understand: I NOT CLAIM STUPID TO DO ANYTHING AT ALL. OOK.
I didn’t claim it could. You’re spinning crap out of whole cloth. Hey, dimwit, of course not every problem in life is containable within the realm of monetary quantification. But we’re talking about making policy — I’m not allowed to suggest that some policy may not be worth its cost? That’s totally fucking asinine.
OOK OOK. I NEVER CLAIM THAT MURDERERS SHOULD GO FREE SO NOT TO INCONVENIENCE LOBBYISTS. OOK. I CLAIM WE CANNOT ESCAPE CONSIDERING COSTS EVER WHNE MAKING POLICY. OOK OOK. NOT SAME THING UNLESS YOU COMPLETE FUCKING MORON OOK.
You’re clearly a red, swollen asshole who wears his hatred of Everyone Else on his sleeve. Why should I take empathy lessons from you?
I agree on cameras, I think the London style camera system should be deployed in every major American city. I definitely think it makes it easier to stop criminals in the act, catch them after the fact, and also is a clear disincentive to commit crimes when there is a certainty of being recorded.
I don’t know anything at all about how much taggants would cost. Like you I suspect the taggants themselves wouldn’t be too expensive, but I wonder about the tracking infrastructure and how much room in said infrastructure there would be for error and bad record keeping which would undermine their usability in criminal trials. I also am intrinsically opposed to “do nothing regulations” which is why I think it reasonable to ask for some projection of how often such a system would be useful.
So your saying that if a quality control error missed a bad lot and people’s hands started getting blown off, there would be no way to recall the bad lot. Wow, the gun industry is run by imbecilles. They all need to be shut down immediately. My peanut butter has better tracking than that!
Sure - the company would publish the lot number and tell people it’s defective and not to use it, just like they do with any other product. They would NOT be able to notify each purchaser individually, because they don’t have purchase records. Really, it’s no different than a food manufacturer making a bad batch of product - it’s up to the consumer to check their product’s label to see if the jar of peanut butter in their pantry is from the bad lot; they don’t get an individual notification from the peanut butter manufacturer.
No, you just don’t know what you are taking about. Have you ever purchased gunpowder, ammunition, or fireworks? if not, maybe you should shut up and listen to those people who have.
A company like JIF or Peter Pan will generally know which wholesaler they’ve sold to, but after that you’d need to contact each of their wholesalers to know where specific parcels have gone definitively. The manufacturing might have some institutional knowledge of how their customers supply chains work, and might say, “typically peanut butter produced at our Elk Snout location goes to RFS foods and Big Ed’s Foods who primarily wholesale to Wal-Mart, Target, Kroger, and 7-11s in the states of Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio.” But to assume the manufacturer of peanut butter regularly tracks where their product goes after it is sold directly to their customer (typically food wholesalers and not direct end customers) is difficult to believe.
Even if a big customer like Wal-Mart acts as its own wholesaler (probably does for much/most of its stuff) you’d have to consult Wal-Mart to track where it went after it hit its distribution center.
I was curious, so I looked up what kind of taggants are proposed…
Do you have any idea how hard it would be to remove microscopic chips from a powder? Your random homemade bomb person probably doesn’t have a centrifuge handy.
If you could make this work, you’ll become rich. You’re suggesting changing the actual composition of the black powder or propellant. That would change the burn rate. Slow-burning gun powder still burns very, very quickly. Fast-burning gun powder burns even quicker. Too fast or too slow and the projectile could become stuck in the barrel. A 2nd round could destroy the receiver or barrel. The increasing pressure from the 1st round could blow up the barrel.
Adding taggants to gun powder creates unstable and dangerous gun powder which is why it isn’t done.
Added taggants can be removed which defeats the “help solve crimes” notion.
Law Enforcement personel have many other, more effective, ways of tracking down criminals. Simply asking for the public’s help seems to have helped locate these two morons.
If some crazy person has decided that others must die in order to satisfy their own personal sociopathic whim, they don’t need gun powder, with or without taggants, to do it.
That’s all the FBI needs. Now ever gunpowder seller is checking the lot numbers they have. Then the FBI has a list of stores that has that lot number. Those stores will have some records of the sales they make, the ones they don’t have records of will be pretty few in number and can be narrowed down by the amount and other things they bought. Few people, in my experience, pay with cash anymore.
I just think suddenly gun proponents are incredibly ignorant about how an investigation works.
Perhaps you see a moral difference in the mechanics of how a piece of metal is propelled into human flesh by an explosive material. Odd, perhaps, but you’re welcome to it.
Another foot-dragging excuse, given the experience you no doubt have with record-keeping being done quickly and automatically every time you do a financial transaction. The technology exists, the willpower is the problem. If you’re referring to registries being forbidden by NRA-bought law to be computerized, and therefore laborious, then you’re not really identifying the heart of the problem.
So, no numbers. I didn’t expect any, though.
Supercilious twit as already noted, now combined with fucking liar. You must feel so proud.
Human life has to have *quantified utility *to you? Really? Do you really not understand that your desire to feel superior to the dum libruls requires you not only to strawman their arguments, but to actually discount the value of human life? You might want to take a step back and think a bit.
If you don’t like what you see in the mirror, it isn’t the mirror’s fault.
Yet that’s the only realm in which you’re willing to explore the subject, and the only way in which you can form a rebuttal. If that’s not how you view the world, with humans being merely agents of economic action, you might show some evidence of it.
What is asinine is dismissing any action aimed at reducing deaths and peremptorily dismissing it that way - especially since you haven’t even fucking bothered to define any such costs.
Thanks for demonstrating what is obviously your typical method of discourse. Now go get your diaper changed.
I would hypothesize that those in the gun culture are more likely to use cash to make purchases. Again - we buy powder in lots as small as a pound or less. When I am reloading, I go through many pounds of powder (and even play with mixing types for fun).
There is also powder in the boxes of ammo you buy. Not sure how many 12 gauge shotgun shells I would have to strip to make a bomb, but I could do it if needed. That is going to mix up your taggants as well.
You’re overestimating the amount of information those stores are going to be able to provide to the FBI. They’ll be able to determine how much of Lot X was sold in a given time interval, but not who bought it. They’re not recording sales at that level of granularity.
Buying gunpowder and ammunition has a lot more in common with buying salt at the grocery store than you seem to believe.
you remind me of the pointy-haired boss in Dilbert. “I just assume that anything I don’t understand is easy.”
so far this place is one of two forums I’ve been involved with where the posters love to blow themselves about how smart and awesome they are. And in both places, I’ve seen a depressing number of prolific posters who seem to think “I’m right because I think I’m smart” is proof enough for all of their assertions.
How about a simple filter screen? Microscopic chips fall thru, the larger black powder granule would not.
I’m sure there is more current informatino available but according to the book you linked -
*…Due to severe time constraints, OTA did litle original research: instead, an intenseive review of existing research was supplemented by discussions with manufacturers, distributors, and users of explosives and gunpowders, and with law enforcement personnel and experts…
…OTA also directed a series of tests on the recovability of the 3M identification taggant. The Aerospace Corp. had conducted a large number of laboratory tests on the survivability of the 3M identification taggants, but the ONLY INFORMATION on the recovery of the taggants under field conditions came from POORLY DOCUMENTED demonstrations and training tests, conducted by BATF, the FBI, and other organizations. These tests, and others conducted by the Institute of Makers of Explosives, HAD PRODUCED CONFLICTING AND CONTRADICTORY RESULTS.
…Some Project Limitations
There are three general limitations to the completeness of this analysis of the proposal to legislate the use of taggants in explosive materials. THE PRIMARY LIMITATION IS CAUSED BY THE PRELIMINARY NATURE OF THE TAGGANT RESEARCH - MUCH DATA ARE SIMPLY NOT AVAILABLE. *
Adding taggants creates an unstable and unsafe product.
Obviously ElvisL1ves simply has nothing to say. Is there anyone else in this thread, pro-taggant or anti-taggant, who believes that people proposing regulations have no requirement to estimate their costs?
I’ve yet to even see a single person mention how many crimes are committed with black powder sold in loose form.
What records will they actually have? And how can you be sure they could be tied to an individual? If each can has its own unique taggant, and you can track each can of powder sold down to time of sale, that isn’t necessarily going to get you the buyers name. They could buy with cash (and probably would if they were going to use it for criminal activity), and even if not, most stores don’t retain credit card slips forever. If you can’t link the individual transaction to a person, you’re stuck with looking through tape back to when the sale happened to see if you can identify the person from the tape, but just like credit card slips stores don’t necessarily store tape for that long (usually less than they do credit card slips.)
But let’s assume all of that comes together and works out for the investigator. It leaves us with 3 simple questions:
How often will this provide investigators with a suspect or information on a suspect that investigators will not have already obtained through other investigative routes?
How often do criminals commit crimes with this product?
How much will adding taggants to the product and tracking their lot numbers add as overhead costs?
I’ve concluded that ElvisL1ves hates the NRA and doesn’t care if adding taggants is a workable system or not. He wants to blame the NRA for something, anything.
Cost analysists would have been done by anyone proposing such a system and by those who would have been expected to impliment such a system.
The bottom line is that a taggant system is too easy to beat and it creates an unsafe product.