Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/01/12/hacksaws-vs-trump.html
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A $10 buck sawzall & a hand full of blades from Harbor Freight would decimate that fence in minutes.
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Agreed - any easily purchased cordless reciprocating saw could cut through the concrete filled steel tubes in those photos. Adding reinforcing strong/hard enough to slow or defeat the reciprocating saw would complicate and multiply the cost of the barrier.
The best deterrent to illegal entry is a fair and safe legal entry process. The more trump pushes people away at the legal entry points, the more pressure there is to cross elsewhere. But of course that is the mode here - push desperate people to the point they are criminal.
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This isn’t a surprise because anything constructed can be deconstructed. The purpose of a fence (or wall or moat or barbed wire or minefield or any fixed defensive structure) is to make the offense pause at the structure and then be open to attack while they deal with the structure. So this Trump wall will only work if the people trying to breach it are spotted. But the thing is, a large desert or sparsely populated scrub will serve the same purpose - the important thing is to spot them. Any military engineer will tell you a structure that is built and then abandoned serves no purpose whatsoever.
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"The steel bollard design is internally reinforced with materials that require time and multiple industrial tools to breach, thereby providing U.S. Border Patrol agents additional response time to affect a successful law enforcement resolution.
And that presupposes someone is there to spot a breach as it’s happening. I’ve been near the border for days on end, and have seen helicopter, truck, and foot patrol. Yet it’s not omnipresent. There are some pretty quiet times.
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“Test of steel prototype for border wall showed it could be sawed through”
“Seen through”, not “sawed through”
Examples:
- We can see through the scam.
- We saw through the scam.
- The scam was seen through.
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Exactly; sawing through a fence is a trivial challenge compared to walking across a desert. The real barriers are already in place.
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But don’t you know? Mexico is a “shithole country” where you can’t buy advanced technology like “electric saws”.
/s
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So the solution is more points of entry (I don’t disagree).
Boy that’ll go over well with the base.
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They are not even see through if you are not looking straight through them. They are opaque at an angle.
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Not more points of entry necessarily, but better processing at the current points. When refugees are told to come back next week or next month, they just might try something more desperate, particularly if they have their kids with them and feel threatened on the other side of the border.
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You are saying that if you go far enough to the right then you can’t see though Trump’s scams?
That sounds correct to me.
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When Americans want drugs, suppliers figure out ways to cross the borders. When Americans want cheap labor, suppliers will figure out ways to cross the borders.
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Surely the answer it to simply move the American Boarder down to, say, the Northern Boarder of Colombia. That would shorten the length of wall by a factor of about 20. I mean, this is just America’s Manifest Destiny, isn’t it?
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While I don’t doubt they were easily defeated by power tools, There’s no fucking way known you’re making it through 4-6 inches of steel with a concrete core with a hacksaw in “Minutes”, except in the loosest sense that you can count any amount of time above two minutes as multiple minutes. And none of the reportage I’ve seen, or the DHS report, reference a hacksaw defeating the fence.
The cuts in the photos look like they were taken with a recip saw(left) and a demo saw(right) both of which are relatively cheap and commonly available tools - but it’s not a hacksaw.
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Except to provide cover for your opponent.
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Why not use the Panama Canal as a ready-made moat?
BTW - is that a typo or a Freudian slip in your post?
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I guess that, “a person who forces their way on to a ship in an attack” is appropriate 
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