I'm slightly excited to not hear more garbage about gun control for a few minutes. Is it sad that I actually said "Thank god it wasn't another shooting" when I heard the news?

 

That's because the major news organizations haven't the slightest idea who did it. Once they do, they will **** it up. They always do.

 

Does anyone know who did it? The heroes are all we can focus on right now, surprisingly no one's taken "credit" for this incident yet. Last I heard at least.

 

If some terrerist schmuck did it, why haven't they trumpeted "we bombed the Great Satan" yet?

 

Some disenfranchised loser. He'll be splashed all over the front page for a couple of days. No one will remember him a year from now.

 

And then what will our politicians foist on us because they "must do something"?

 

Background checks for pressure-cooker sales, closing the flea-market pressure-cooker loophole, and a national pressure-cooker registry.

 

You guys are forgetting about the most devious part of this all.... BACKPACKS! They allow pressure cooker bombs to be smuggled in plain view! Ban them!

My schools growing up always required clear backpacks.

 

So, serious question from someone who is not well-versed in improvised explosive devices.

Why a pressure cooker?

I really can't quite grasp this. It seems like a highly sub-optimal vessel to make a bomb out of.

As compared to an old fashioned pipe bomb made from threaded iron pipe, it seems to me that a pressure cooker would tend to have a much lower yield strength. They're typically made of aluminum, and they have a large, weak seal between the lid and the pot which would seem to provide a significant failure point. In my admittedly simplistic understanding, this would cause the intensity of the explosion to be lower.

Consider a pile of smokeless powder sitting on the ground. You light it, and it goes *FOOF*. But there's not really an explosion per se, just a big flash. You could light an ounce of powder on a table with a long match with very little danger to yourself.

You get an explosion by containing the energy of the powder within a strong vessel and allowing it to build up until it exceeds the ability of the vessel to contain it, resulting a a *BOOM*.

A vessel with a higher yield strength should, by this logic, produce a bigger *BOOM*. Like running a high-compression engine in detonation vs. running a low compression engine normally (vs. just pouring some gasoline onto the ground and lighting it.)

At this point, I've done enough googling on the subject that I'm now probably in at least half a dozen federal databases, and while I've found a lot of descriptions of pressure cookers in use as IEDs, I have yet to find any material which objectively compares them to other common vessels (eg: iron pipe) in terms of effectiveness as measured by explosive yield per unit of propellant mass or total volume.

 

Pretty sure any joe Perez thermostat esq videos of the pros and cons of different vessels for IEDs would be the last post you ever make as a free man.

 

In for video!!

 

But would be oh so amazing.

 

My forensic accounting teacher is an active FBI special supervisory agent. Last night he was discussing the event because he is also a trained explosives expert. He said the most likely reason a pressure cooker was used instead of an iron pipe was for two reasons. If it were discovered in the backpack it would not have been immediately recognizable as a bomb like an iron pipe would have been. The other reason is because the person who made it was not an expert. He was talking about the blast itself and how it was actually really ineffective for the size of the device and density of the crowd. The blast was very asymmetrical and reminded him a lot of simple IED's that were used in Iraq.

 

I heard a very good interview early on from a guy that was hosting a post-race party at his office or apartment that overlooked the finish line. He said they heard the explosion and felt it shudder the building slightly, then he "smelled cordite." He said, "I'm a veteran and I recognized that smell" from previous experience.

He also said the scene was "something you see in Baghdad, not Boston."


It's sad to think that there are people out there - even if they represent such a miniscule percentage of the human population - that think targeting non-combatants like women and children to mutilate, maime and kill is acceptable to accomplish some goal.

 

FTFY.

NASA really needs to up their outreach program game...

 

Obama's "double tap" drone strikes resemble that remark.

 

I am open to that possibility, though I haven't seen any data on the non-combatant casualties (and doubt accurate info even exists or is available to the public).

I appreciate your use of the word "resemble" to note that there is a difference. Primarily, that (at least in theory), the drone strikes are targetting combatant targets and sometimes taking non-combatants out as "collateral damage."

I have lots of issues with the use of drones, but I think it's important to distinguish the primary targets here.

 

I have very little trust in politicians' words, including "this foreign policy is for your own good".

 

https://i.imgur.com/N10WUxV.jpg

 

As you can see, it was Bigfoot that did it. Jack Links is gonna have to fire him now.