Thursday, December 1, 2011

Ka-Boom!

Oh, lookie!  Another crazy guy with a gun, a threat to himself and to others - as was his ammo.  But our pro-gun readers would fight tooth and nail any attempt to stop people like this from endangering people like the rest of us - or himself.

from KSTP TV News, MN:

Package Dropped by Suicidal Man Highly Explosive

Police in southern Wisconsin say a package dropped by a man who shot and killed himself was highly explosive.
Authorities say the 35-year-old man shot himself in the chest with a muzzle-loaded gun on the sidewalk of a residential neighborhood in Waukesha Tuesday night. A 3- by 4-inch package fell near the man.
Police say the man killed himself shortly after officers were called to the neighborhood by a friend of the man. She told police he was suicidal, possibly had a gun and possessed bomb-making material.
Suspecting the package could be explosive, officers called the Milwaukee County Bomb Squad which detonated the device. Police Capt. Ron Oremus says it contained black powder and ammunition. He says a suicide note and bomb-making equipment were found in the man's residence.

8 comments:

  1. It must really scare you that the kind of gun that he had can be ordered on-line, no paperwork, so long as it's shipped to one of the United States. The Peoples' Republics, on the other hand, don't go for that.

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  2. On a technical matter, once again the news media get details wrong. Blackpowder is not a high explosive. It's not even "highly explosive," whatever that means. It's in fact a low explosive, since it burns, rather than creates a supersonic shockwave.

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  3. Thanks for the post. I'm sure Greg is gonna tell us muzzle-loaded weapons don't account for enough shootings for us to worry about.

    Guess what, when the country comes to its senses and begins controlling firearms better, these off-the-books collectors' items are going to have a big resurgence.

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  4. I got my reproduction Remington .44 muzzle-loader revolver from a sporting goods retailer with no muss or fuss. I doubt that you'll find many cases of one being used in crime. If I have to use one in a fight, I'd get five shots and then have to ask my enemy to get a cup of coffee while I reload. That's the reason that many people in the Old West carried more than one.

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  5. "On a technical matter, once again the news media get details wrong. Blackpowder is not a high explosive. It's not even "highly explosive," whatever that means. It's in fact a low explosive, since it burns, rather than creates a supersonic shockwave."

    KSTP's words were, "highly explosive". You set yourself up an arbiter of correct terminology for firearms and explosives AND correct english usage (your lame explanation of the language of the 2nd Amendment) and you fail at both tasks.

    Black powder is "highly explosive" under the conditions that it is used for to make pipe bombs and other IED's. Most pipe bombs made by amateurs are filled with some form of gunpowder and sometimes nails, ball bearings or other sorts of metal to create more of an anti-personnel weapon. They are highly dangerous and quite explosive when properly constructed.

    All explosives burn/oxidize at a high rate. High explosives "burn" at a much higher rate than black powder and create enormous volumes of gas which, as gases will do when under pressure, attempt to reach equilibrium by moving away from the center of the explosion.

    As I did on a previous thread about the M-16, I invite you to hold a pipe bomb made of a piece of 1/2" BI pipe, filled with about 4 ounces of black powder and capped at both ends with threaded pipe caps. Hell, I'll even give you the option of holding it with a pair of tongs 3 or 4 feet long so's you won't burn your fingers. Get back to me with the results, okay?

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  6. Democommie,

    All you did was confirm what I said. Blackpowder is not a high explosive. It is certainly dangerous, but that wasn't the subject of discussion. The phrase, highly explosive, is just the kind of thing designed to make viewers nervous so they'll continue watching the news.

    As for holding a pipe bomb, where am I supposed to get one of those? You wouldn't be telling me to commit a crime, would you? As far as I know, it's illegal for me to manufacture such a device, and it would be illegal for me to set it off. Besides which, I am by no means qualified to construct or operate explosive devices of the type that you describe. They're a different class of object from guns and other such generally available things.

    Let's see: You're typically rude and offensive, but now you've moved on to encouraging me to commit a crime that may be a felony. Are there any limits with you?

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  7. Greg Camp:

    You are too fucking tonedeaf for it not to be deliberate.

    Go watch some videos of blackpowder bombs going off and tell me that "highly explosive" is a technical term that is mistakenly applied. You're really a crybaby, no shit.

    You hold ludicrous views (blind people should be allowed the use of gunz) and you criticize a newswriter for not taking the time to type (or the space for that matter) something like:

    "Black powder, while not a high explosive, such as Trinitrotoluene (TNT) or cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine (C4), Pentaerythritol tetranitrate (Primer Cord) or Pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN) is sometimes used as a material for bombmaking--as it was in the instant case--and, although it burns at a really high rate it doesn't really, like, 'splode. I mean, if you wuz to stand real close to a pipe bomb when it "burnin' at a pretty high rate", the first thing that would go through your mind is, "My goodness. Even though it's just really, like, burnin' at a high rate, it SOUNDS like it's 'splodin.". In all likelihood the next thing to go through your mind would be shrapnel."

    You really are just funnin' us, right? I can't believe that someone involved in educating college students in the use of the english language is as clueless about it as you seem to be.

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  8. Democommie,

    If you'll read carefully, you'll note that I said that blackpowder is an explosive. The news writer ought to have written the same thing: Explosive package dropped by suicidal man. "Highly" was a sensationalist adverb that adds nothing useful to the news.

    Oh, but I spelled everything correctly. Try this:

    Blakpowdah's splosive. It go boom!

    Get it now?

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