Saturday, April 20, 2013
Boston Marathon Bombing - 2nd Suspect Arrested
Does anyone else get the impression that everybody's exaggerating about this? These news people were talking about how heroic everybody was, even themselves, repeating it over and over. On another video, the governor and police chief were doing the same thing. You'd think they'd just arrested the anti-Christ or some mass murderer who'd killed thousands, instead of a 20-something skinny kid.
What do you think? Please leave a comment.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Feeling sorry that someone else who hates America got taken down?
ReplyDeleteWhat cracks me up is the contemptible worms trying to exploit a bombing in furtherance of the agenda of oppressive gun laws. We have Sen. Lautenberg's reanimated corpse pushing "gunpowder control,", and pompous, effete socialist Lawrence O'Donnell blaming the NRA(!) for the fact that gunpowder manufacturers aren't required to incorporate "taggants" into the product.
ReplyDeleteO'Donnell, of course, never mentions a finding by the National Academy of Sciences that the idea isn't technically feasible (it is, in fact, potentially quite dangerous).
The "gun control" agenda--so morally bankrupt as to exploit the blood of the innocent in pursuit of their lust to trample the Constitutionally guaranteed, fundamental human right of the individual to keep and bear arms. And so intellectually bankrupt as to think that exploiting bombing victims, too, strengthens their case, when they notice that "gun violence" levels in the U.S. have fallen too low to provide enough victims.
I saw that Lawrence O'Donnell piece, and I just want to add to what Kurt said about potential danger of adding taggants to gunpowder.
DeleteTaggants work in plastic explosives where they can be mixed in with the plastic and stay suspended in it as it solidifies. Gunpowder is a powder, not a solid charge. The very nature of the powder would make it hard to have the taggants incorporated into the grains of powder. You would either wind up with particles of gunpowder with varying amounts of each particle being taggant and powder, or you would have standard gunpowder with granulated taggants mixed in. It would be impossible, either way, to tell how much of a scoop of gunpowder was actual gunpowder and how much was the taggant compound.
This wouldn't affect the effectiveness of the powder for making a bomb--just shovel a bunch into a pipe or pressure cooker and detonate.
This would, however, be a HUGE problem for making ammunition. Some rounds would have more taggant in the charge--others less. Those with more might squib fire and leave the bullet in the barrel of the gun, waiting to blow it up if another is fired before that condition is discovered. Those with less taggant would be, in effect, over powdered and might blow the gun up on their own.
Loading ammo, whether done in a commercial factory, or done by a hobbyist in his own shop, is an extremely precise science--miniscule deviations affect accuracy, slightly larger deviations affect weapon cycling, and slightly larger deviations can be deadly. The spread between accuracy affecting deviations and deadly ones is very small. If you look in a hobbyist's reloading lab, you will find measuring equipment that is more precise than anything you'll find outside a chemistry lab. You can't just haphazardly add a bunch of taggants to the mix and not have problems arise.
Great explanation, Tennessean--thanks. I was too lazy to go to that much trouble, and would not have been able to explain it that well, anyway.
DeleteAdd chemistry to the long list of things the gun control freaks know nothing about. If those taggants are combustible, they'd also change the nature of gas production upon firing. Reloading manuals and experts I've talked to strongly advise against mixing two different powders because of the unpredictability of the result.
DeleteYes, mixing powders is definitely a bad idea!
DeleteI can understand ignorance on this subject, which was why I posted this preemptively, even before any such discussion began here.
When I first watched that Lawrence O'Donnel piece, I didn't think of this immediately; I just thought that it was a tacky and vindictive move to try and pull the NRA in as responsible for the bombing. Since that was about bombs, however, the problem didn't spring to mind immediately. It was only after the fact, as I reflected on the issue, that I started to see the problems with taggants.
To give the benefit of the doubt, I tried to think of any way you could do it, and the closest thing I thought you might be able to do it with would be a rod powder (They look like broken mechanical pencil lead). However, even then, you could not guarantee a consistent mixture of taggant and powder. Also, most powder I've ever seen is in flakes or granules. Only place I've found the rod type is in Russian Ammo (7.62x54R) and military tracers where I've been told that it is the best to burn hot enough to ignite the tracing compound. I don't know why it isn't used in other ammo, but I'm sure there's a reason I just haven't learned yet--you can only learn stuff this complex so quickly.
I guess we could start making cordite again.
DeleteMaybe. All reloading would have to be relearned, and you would likely lose the ability to fine tune loads the way target shooters do, but with extremely strict quality controls you might be able to do it in cordite in such a way as to prevent squibs and ka-BOOMs. Maybe.
DeleteCourse, I wonder how well DGI would work with Cordite--don't know much about how much it fouls, etc.
And of course, even if this COULD work with it and we switched all smokeless powder firearms to using cordite, you'd still have the issue of what to do about black powder firearms, the fact that people can make black powder fairly easily, or the fact that even if we had taggants in all gunpowders, people could make plenty of other untraceable low-order explosives after spending a short time online.
The police state is a total and utter failure. Billions upon billions of dollars spent to spy on, put cameras everywhere and monitor are communications. But it was a good excuse to exert even more power and destroy more liberties, in the name of safety.
ReplyDeleteFrom the WP: "By order of the state, a public transit system that serves more than 1.3 million riders a day was padlocked. Amtrak trains were suspended between Boston and New York. Businesses, offices and some of the world’s greatest universities were shut. Taxis were ordered off the streets for part of the day. Residents were instructed to stay inside."
Daniel McAdams has it correct: Like the government's initial failure (or worse) to identify and apprehend the suspects before the bombing, the government also failed in its military assault on an entire city.
Let us never forget that Dzhokar Tsarnaev was discovered by a private citizen, who happened to go out and check on his boat (i.e. violating the lockdown order of the cops), see a body inside of it, and call the cops. In other words, the police state achieved nothing but the psychological conditioning of the population: when we, the state, decide any particular event is important enough, you will lose every single right including possibly the right to life if you resist.
And in the Washington Times, Thomas Mullen sums it up:
19-year-old Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokar Tsarnaev is in custody. Assuming that Tsarnaev is indeed guilty of these crimes, a very real threat to public safety has been taken off the streets. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that the Tsarnaev brothers have taken the last vestiges of a free society in America down with them.
The Bill of Rights was already on life support before this tragedy. Before the dust settled after 9/11, the 4th Amendment had been nullified by the Patriot Act. The 5th and 6th Amendments were similarly abolished with the Military Commission Act of 2006 and the 2012 NDAA resolution, which contained a clause allowing the president to arrest and indefinitely detain American citizens on American soil without due process of law.
This legacy is the real Boston tragedy. The Rubicon has been crossed.
orlin sellers
Exactly. The only good news here is that a lot of us are paying attention.
DeleteBack when that amendment was being tacked on to the 2012 NDAA, I was talking to folks about the danger of what the act could allow the government to do. I remember telling them that the first person it would be used on would be a real, genuine dirtbag so that the precedent could be set--overreach against other American citizens probably wouldn't come until the courts had approved the act.
DeleteNow, this happens, and along comes John McCain and Lindsey Graham, two supporters of that amendment, pushing for it to be used.
I would feel good that the president has told them no, except for the fact that his alternative choice is to use an extremely stretched version of the "public safety" exigency that his administration proposed a while back--a version that even one of the pundits on MSNBC today said stretched the court precedent to the breaking point.
We, as a nation, get so frightened by each of these attacks that we give up more freedom every time. I'm already sad and shocked by how much has been lost in my lifetime, but the losses are just accelerating.