Isn’t that basically what Cheney and Rumsfeld set up? Just not via the medium of TV.
Yeah, here’s the NY Times take. Luckily no one apparently killed.
Somebody brought this up in the locker room at the gym today (and not, not the type of locker room Trump goes to; we don’t talk trash about women and it’s mostly a bunch of middle aged guys who long ago got over comparing wiener sizes, and are more concerned about our waistlines and blood pressure). Anyhow, I noted that pipe bombs were things the rowdier rednecks at my high school used to use on the school doors on the weekends. We had a pair of kids, the Birdsong brothers, who made small bombs and blew off the doors, shot out the windows occasionally, and generally raised hell. Long time ago, when stuff like that was considered juvenile delinquency. But they were probably Baptists.
Yeah, a lot of stuff we did as kids would have gotten US expelled after Columbine.
Prior to Columbine, kids played with explosives and fireworks because it was fun to blow shit up, not because they wanted to hurt anyone.
In the old days, if a high schooler wanted to hurt someone, he’d just get his buddies and beat the shit out of them.
Or so the legend goes. I wasn’t that type of high schooler, myself.
I had some VERY realistic looking cap/squirt guns when I was a kid. God I hope they don’t make those anymore.
Oh yeah. I made all kinds of rockets, explosives, etc., as a kid. Many of the explosives were intended to be rockets when I made them…
An interest in chemistry, a bit of boredom over summer vacation, access to raw materials, and a rural AZ community is a potent combination.
These days, I’d have been on a watch list by the time I was 6.
Ah those halycon days of youth, when you discovered that milk bottle petrol bombs were much more fun if you mixed the petrol with washing up liquid.
A friends older brother (now a senior officer in the Met) had a badly photocopied anarchists handbook and told us about match head bombs using a nut and 2 bolts that were insanely dangerous to even make.
I remember in third grade art class I made a reasonably realistic replica of a Walther P38 out of a pencil, paper and masking tape. My teacher (Mrs. Tabor) was so impressed that she had me show it off to the entire class while praising my creativity. These days, I would have been sent to the principal’s office and probably suspended for a few days.
If you were lucky. If you were unlucky they’d call the cops who might shoot you.
Growing up at the time of Columbine was loads of fun. The morning after it happened they had all the kids sit in one big room (good thing there wasn’t a shooter that day) and they told us if we did so much as look weird we would be expelled or jailed. Even as a kid it was obvious that the administrators were looking for a scapegoat to expel to show they were doing something about the school shooting problem. I have no idea how many kids were hounded into suicide or otherwise had their lives ruined in those years, but I’m confident that it’s orders of magnitude more than were victims of school shootings.
But I shouldn’t complain. It was the most educational experience I ever had at school. I learned that day that most people care more about covering their own ass than kids’ lives.
Ya emptying out my junior high with our homemade smoke bombs planted in the restroom was the highlight of my junior high years. I learned about chemical reactions and as a bonus one of the class assholes got blamed, but not punished for it. I think we ended up setting off 3 but only one evacuated the whole school. The threats of the principal for expulsion ended our little gangs bombing campaign.
I remember our role models were the pranks the CalTech students pulled off, which seemed to have diminished over time.
About 15 years before Columbine, my friends and I used to play a game called “Killer” where players would be assigned human targets (also players) to assassinate. You didn’t know all the folks playing – you only knew the indentity of your next target. Once you kill them, you get their target’s name.
To eliminate a target, you shot them with a nerf gun or stab them with a rubber knife or something. The contact had to be a physical “hit”: you couldn’t just make “pew pew” noises and claim that they were dead; the ability to dodge out of the way and foil the attempt was pretty key to the game. And for our rules, the weapon had to be recognizable as a “weapon” – you couldn’t pull out a stapler and claim it was a .45.
Anyway, back in the 80s most of the action naturally took place in the halls of the high school, and the total number of players would often run in the multiple dozens. I can remember roping friendly teachers and administrators into the game by asking when such-and-such was scheduled to use the mimiograph machine or by asking them to distract my target so I could approach unseen, pull out my (very realistic-looking) rubber knife and stab them in the kidney.
Inconceivable now.
Posted a silly reference as a response to Tin but then realized what thread I was really in. Whoops. Sorry, removed. It was only up for like 2 minutes anyways.
I must admit that I am grimly amused by how bad the guy’s bomb was, as it was strapped to his body and yet failed to even kill himself.
It’s the thought that counts!
In general, if you look at the history of violent expressions of (however muddled) political will, it’s prety amazing how inept most perpetrators are. It seems that, in terrorism as in everything else, the idea is easy, the execution, well, that’s hard.
We should, of course, be quite thankful of that in these cases.
I once had a lengthy discussion about criminals in general and how the idea of a “mastermind” is pretty fanciful. In any given risk assessment or ROI evaluation, crime generally isn’t worth it with the presumption you have the skills and opportunity to support yourself via conventional means. That leaves the desperate, the unskilled, and the occasional deranged person unable to make decent decisions as the bulk of your criminal body.
I wonder if a similar dynamic exists for terrorists.
PS - bad joke about this, in case someone’s in a dark mood:
So is this the “thoughts and prayers” version of terrorism?
So this latest doofus in NYC tried it and lived. Maybe he can be interviewed and we can gain some insight into why a man that was here for 7 years tried to blow people up.
I’m trying to think of other examples of suicide bombers that were caught instead of killed. Richard Reid (the dumb shoe bomber… Thanks a lot every time I have to take off my shoes at the airport, asshole) is the only one I can think of.
It was a 12 inch pipe filled with black powder. The pipe did not completely fragment, leaving a six inch piece intact. Presumably this funneled the blast away from his body to some extent. If he had used smokeless powder it probably would have killed him and others as well.