I think the point you seemed to have missed is that building a fertilizer bomb is not as simple as obtaining a gun in many places in the US. There are no specific fertilizer bomb stores. There are no fertilizer bomb “shows”. They cannot be reused, you would have to build a new one every time…unlike a gun. They are illegal everywhere because they are bombs, and and every time you make a new one, you risk blowing yourself up first…which is a great feature!
Running a truck into a crowd, I mean sure, but I doubt you’d take out, say, 20 (just going off of what the current number of dead is in Maine), or 60 (Las Vegas) people. The Boston bombing “only” killed 3 people, so yeah sure I guess I’d prefer a relatively few people to take the time to make one and, assuming they didn’t fuck up, sure, I guess some innocent people could die here and there. It would suck, but I like trying to minimize easily preventable deaths. People escape from prison, too, but most don’t, and so we don’t just throw our hands up and say “oh well, guess we won’t investigate” every time that happens.
And I guess you could run a truck into an elementary school classroom somehow and manage to mow down 19 kids, but I really doubt it. I don’t have anything to compare that to, unlike…well yeah there’s been a lot of those in schools to look at over the past 20 or so years, so pick one.
It’s interesting that you bring up McVeigh, not too long ago I finished the book “Homegrown, Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism” by Jeffrey Toobin. It’s fantastic, highly recommend.
While he did have numerous weapons, his major beef was with the federal government, and it took him years to become as radicalized as he did. There were also other factors, like him failing out of a military special forces class, so he went awhile between jobs and sleeping at friends’ places just to make ends meet. And he was upset over Ruby Ridge and Waco.
Eventually he was able to convince Terry Nichols to help him, but quite a few told him to get lost before Nichols agreed. But he definitely already had plenty of guns if he had wanted to do something before OKC (spoiler alert, he is a “person of interest” in at least one, an infant), but he didn’t. He wanted to make a statement. And we haven’t seen anything on that scale other than 9/11 and maybe Boston (if you count straight up terrorism). So yeah, let’s do it. Seems like we already have people who want to make enough of a statement that they make bombs and kill people, in addition to all of the guns in this country.
I’d be cool with making at least one of those options much less accessible.
I think the point you seemed to have missed is that building a fertilizer bomb is not as simple as obtaining a gun in many places in the US. There are no specific fertilizer bomb stores. There are no fertilizer bomb “shows”. They cannot be reused, you would have to build a new one every time…unlike a gun. They are illegal everywhere because they are bombs, and and every time you make a new one, you risk blowing yourself up first…which is a great feature!
Running a truck into a crowd, I mean sure, but I doubt you’d take out, say, 20 (just going off of what the current number of dead is in Maine), or 60 (Las Vegas) people. The Boston bombing “only” killed 3 people, so yeah sure I guess I’d prefer a relatively few people to take the time to make one and, assuming they didn’t fuck up, sure, I guess some innocent people could die here and there. It would suck, but I like trying to minimize easily preventable deaths. People escape from prison, too, but most don’t, and so we don’t just throw our hands up and say “oh well, guess we won’t investigate” every time that happens.
And I guess you could run a truck into an elementary school classroom somehow and manage to mow down 19 kids, but I really doubt it. I don’t have anything to compare that to, unlike…well yeah there’s been a lot of those in schools to look at over the past 20 or so years, so pick one.
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It’s interesting that you bring up McVeigh, not too long ago I finished the book “Homegrown, Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism” by Jeffrey Toobin. It’s fantastic, highly recommend.
While he did have numerous weapons, his major beef was with the federal government, and it took him years to become as radicalized as he did. There were also other factors, like him failing out of a military special forces class, so he went awhile between jobs and sleeping at friends’ places just to make ends meet. And he was upset over Ruby Ridge and Waco.
Eventually he was able to convince Terry Nichols to help him, but quite a few told him to get lost before Nichols agreed. But he definitely already had plenty of guns if he had wanted to do something before OKC (spoiler alert, he is a “person of interest” in at least one, an infant), but he didn’t. He wanted to make a statement. And we haven’t seen anything on that scale other than 9/11 and maybe Boston (if you count straight up terrorism). So yeah, let’s do it. Seems like we already have people who want to make enough of a statement that they make bombs and kill people, in addition to all of the guns in this country.
I’d be cool with making at least one of those options much less accessible.