Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/03/30/man-who-tried-to-build-a-ricin.html
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Well, his lawyer maintains that he didn’t want to carry out a terrorist attack in Germany at all; all this was just to gain street cred with ISIS prior to joining them, so it’s all cool…
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would such a bomb work though? ricin ≠ uranium, and making bombs is hard - post oklahoma city most functional states banned the chemicals best used for bombmaking or made it such it’s hard to obtain them w/o attracting attention.
so the end result might be a bomb that kills 2-3 people ala the boston bombing, which was a terrible tragedy, but compared to OKC shows how far we’ve come at preventing terror.
Well, the being-hit-by-a-ball bearing-propelled-by-an-explosion bit would definitely work.
The ricin bit could work theoretically, there is proof of concept.
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Without going too into it… Ricin bombs aren’t dirty bombs or anything that would require uranium, or a big explosive. Ricin is a naturally derived poison that does really nasty stuff to people, it’s been used a couple of times by terrorists. (Sadly, it would likely kill more than 2-3 people. :-()
I wouldn’t really consider it a bioweapon myself since ricin doesn’t self-replicate; it’s a poison gas attack which is horrific and terrible in it’s own right and rightfully deserving of terrorist charges. But on the other hand, I’m not exactly crying that the guilty, guilty terrorists might get some extra time for a spec that doesn’t really apply.
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Thank you for explaining ricin to me, but I’m aware of everything you listed.
To be clear, what I meant is unlike uranium, I am not clear ricin would survive an explosion. Uranium or anther radioactive substance could be dispersed by a so called “dirty bomb” - I’m not clear the same logic applies to a poison - biological material might be destroyed in a blast.
(And I purposefully did not go into too much detail because I am not going to share any thoughts about what factors might impact that… it’s good to threat model, not good to hand out certain knowledge to randoms scrolling BB).
Luckily very often the people who want to destroy society often lack the education and expertise to do so, since learning those skills requires a level of impulse control most lone wolves lack.
(Hence the most common terror attack in America being gun attacks - doesn’t take a genius to buy an AR and big mag, just couple thousand dollars)
Careful, implying that the only reason to own these things has to do with mental imbalance is the kind of thing that gets flagged around here.
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being “disturbed” has nothing to do with mental diagnosis. (“mental imbalance” isn’t in the DSM either 
)
plenty of people who are perfectly sane commit horrible acts, and the vast majority of “mentally unbalanced” people are just as, if not more, peaceful than so called “normal” folks.
killing innocent people is disturbing. it’s fair to call someone who decides that it is a good idea to shoot innocent people disturbed.
“ A country’s rate of gun ownership is a far better predictor of public mass shootings than indicators of mental illness, said Adam Lankford, a University of Alabama criminologist who published a 2016 analysis of data from 171 countries.
“If mental illness were the driving factor, we would expect the countries with highest suicide rates to have higher rates of public mass shootings. That’s not what we see,” Lankford said.
Instead, Lankford found, gun ownership per person is the best predictor.“
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please see the reply i made to someone else. i’m not going to repeat myself over and over.
i will edit the post since apparently it’s so disturbing
I wasn’t disturbed- I just thought that the facts would be useful to people.
Apparently- guns do kill people.
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Bringing up mental illness in a thread on terrorism seems a bit of a non sequitur at best but hey, go hog wild
Well - if bringing up means denying the connection that others have clearly inferred from some people’s statements sure - whatevs.
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i clarified, i edited, no sure what else i can do except not say mass shootings are bad.
sorry it’s a sore subject.
i’m not having the best mental health day either, and frankly am frustrated that some rules on the board such as “assume good faith” are sporadically enforced, especially if it’ll let folks climb out of the woodwork to pile on someone who made a well intentioned post.
cheers!
Using euphemisms doesn’t dodge the violation of the guidelines. To my understanding, there are at least 2 reasons for the rule:
- The mentally ill are already stigmatized by society, there’s no need to pile on more.
- Shooters don’t deserve the “out” of being labeled as “crazy” or “disturbed.” They are just selfish, often bigoted assholes.
Complaining about having the above pointed out is bad form.
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Then flag me or tag in @orenwolf because at this point I feel harassed.
I edited the post, I reiterated that I agree mental illness has no correlation with violence to the multiple people who took issue, and things seemed to have settled.
Now you’re jumping in after all of that.
For context, this is an issue very very close to home for me,
So I’m sorry that I didn’t use perfect phrasing when discussing a highly emotional issue.
But as I said in my previous reply, I am not having the best mental health day myself. Not one person commented on that though, which hurts given that we’re allegedly up in arms because I deginerated those with mental health issues.
My intention was to say that some people do bad things because they are jerks, assholes or whatever other word we collectively decide is the best - the opposite of your perception.
I see now "disturbed" is not the way to denote that.
I have repeatedly clarified and apologized and your feedback is duly noted.
But unless you truly think harranguing someone who has had a spree killing happen in their own neighborhood is in the spirit of the boards, please stop beating a dead horse.
Ironically part of why I am reacting so strongly is because I was stereotyped post-Columbine, and much like this interaction would get hauled in to be told all the horrible things that could be done to me because someone decided to misperceive what I said. They wouldn’t actually punish me, nonono, just a long line of people getting extremely angry that my response was “Nope, that’s not what I meant, sorry you feel that way, if you want to punish me do so, just leave me alone” once it got to the 3rd or 4th one.
It was a poor choice of words, without ill intent, which I’ve repeatedly clarified and apologized for, but if one more person slides into my mentions it’ll be a really high ratio of people complaining about something I repeatedly apologized for vs ZERO who touched on the part where I said it was a bad mental health day for myself, leaving me struggling to be polite since I can’t help but feel like I’m being concern trolled.
As I have repeatedly said, I did not mean to imply all gun owners are mentally ill, or that being mentally ill makes someone a spree killer when I called spree killers “disturbed”.
I deeply, DEEPLY apologize for the error.
Now please, let’s drop it, OK?
I am sorry to hear about that. I hope your day improves. Sincerely.
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thank you, i’m sorry for the wall of text.
unfortunately, everything stressing me out is outside my control. this is usually where i come when i’m feeling raw since, let’s be frank: if you’re having a bad day reddit or twitter isn’t the best place 
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You and me both. I think it’s great that BB is a place we can go for a bit of light in a dark world.
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