The Lawyer Who Defended Dzhokhar Tsarnaev
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
It's stupid to screw around with improvised explosives, absent a really compelling need. Lots of subtle dangers, like static electricity, lots of people kill themselves trying it.
It's stupid to plant them in a venue with a zillion cameras in operation.
It's stupid to kill a police officer and not have the wherewithal to take his gun because of its retention holster, without even using a knife to remove it from his belt, or, hey, just undo the belt, to try harder later.
It's stupid to release the guy who's car you hijacked for a while.
It's stupid to attack a part of the country that's notoriously mostly on your side (in the National Lampoon's General Alexander Haig Jr. Republican Map of the World the Boston area was one of three that shared the color of the Warsaw Pact). Not to mention enrage them enough so that the jury votes for the death penalty.
Etc. The were not the smartest jihadists in the drawer.
Of course, plenty of the above depends on believing the Official Story, but it does paint a consistent picture.
I'd add that I'm hardly resistant to government conspiracies, they just have to make sense. E.g. the immolation of the religious dissidents in Waco sure looks like it was pre-planned by a very small number of members of the FBI's Hostage "Rescue" Team. Means, motive, opportunity, all in alignment, and it could be done by a small enough group that they could keep the secret to their graves.
What is the claimed alternative Boston Marathon Bombing motive here? How was it even vaguely commensurate with the consequences if discovered? What does Occam's Razor suggest? Etc.
It's part of the perennial efforts to control guns:
http://www.examiner.com/article/lautenberg-introduces-gunpow...
To my knowledge, they scavenged flash powder etc. from fireworks, although of course they could have bought smokeless powder. Although that would very likely have looked a lot more suspicious or left a clear trail to them if by mail order, not that they were at all good at OPSEC.
Ah, no other country in the world has a gun culture quite like ours, I suspect our hobby of reloading is unique. So I'll bet the on-line recipes for these pressure cooker bombs depend on fireworks, which are a nearly universal thing, and the brothers didn't think of/wanted to take a chance on substituting a smokeless powder.
Not that it matters for a POS like Lautenberg, but it's also the case that anyone thinking such an event would result in real action against reloaders---almost certainly a minority of gun owners---is not well connected to reality.
Not that this government didn't attempt a deadly conspiracy with this aim like Fast and Furious, or hasn't in the past with a much higher body count, Waco, but this doesn't seem to be one. If it was, why not e.g. have someone use an "assault weapon" against a crowd attending an event in a stadium (which is the beginning plot of a novel I've heard about).
Yes, no other country is like the USA where people are free to keep guns and we intend on keeping it that way. If folks don't like it, they literally have every other country in the world as an alternative. But here, we are not the property of the government and we reserve the right to react to it. Americans used to be historical people, they understood that we shouldn't get involved in "foreign entanglements". Do you at least agree this country has been taken over by an elite intent on disarming citizens via piecemeal policy implementations?
It would be interesting to hear your opinion on Sandy Hooks as well. Many politicians and law enforcement officers had to be silenced and it was a more obvious excuse to pass legislation.
Do you at least agree this country has been taken over by an elite intent on disarming citizens via piecemeal policy implementations?
Not exactly. The history roughly goes:
Actions to suppress dueling
Actions to keep guns out of the hands of freedmen/blacks post-Civil War.
Actions for/against different immigrants, e.g. Sullivan Law for the Irish.
End of discrimination, enforced against all, guns are icky!
However:
It would be interesting to hear your opinion on Sandy Hooks as well. Many politicians and law enforcement officers had to be silenced and it was a more obvious excuse to pass legislation.
I'm not sure what you're getting at here, but there's always been serious pushback. E.g. the NFA originally proposed including handguns, and that was zapped in a Congress that was generally giving FDR what he wanted.
I believe that the '70-80s represented the high water mark of gun US control. Vicious enforcement of the GCA of '68 was spiked with the FOPA of '86 (albeit with new machine guns banned to us), the nationwide sweep of concealed carry started with Florida in '87, the gun grabbers had a lot of fun with "assault weapons" bans, but they're now not an issue outside of "communist" states like California and Massachusetts, etc.
Pretty much all the 21st Century "progress" in gun control has been in traditionally anti-gun states, even post-Sandy Hook, with the notable exception of Colorado. And that, and the new angle of laws that ostensibly outlaw temporary sharing and renting of guns, are happening because it's a pet cause of billionaire Bloomberg. Either through initiative in Washington, or the legislature in Oregon, but the rest of the gun control apparat is on life support.
However, the Zeitgeist is such that the enforcement authorities are quick to say they won't enforce the unconscionable parts of those laws. So who knows, those Jim Crow laws weren't enforced against white until say the '50s or so, '60s especially.
The situation mostly seems to be in mostly in stasis, with small gains and losses in the various pro- and anti-gun states, the Supremes seem to have decided we only have a right to keep arms, we guess that'll be the result of the appeal of Peruta to the 9th Circuit (California and Hawaii), but the 7th Circuit ordered Illinois to go shall issue (!) which they did (!). Ah, this is still be fought out in D.C., and that might put the Supremes on the spot, we're currently winning the courts albeit not on the ground.
For the foreseeable future I don't see any major changes. Maybe California will go from iffy to horrible (Jerry Brown is sane here (!)), but much of the rest of the country thinks the state is generally going that way in all areas.... Me, I feel the best I have since way back in the '70s when the BATF was stamping out gun culture ... through atrocities which resulted in a fierce reaction. I expect that pattern of attack and counter-attack to continue, and in the meanwhile, Americans have been arming themselves like never before, soaking up pretty much every rifle of military utility available. If worst comes to worst, we're prepared.