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Comment by bigDinosaur | Hacker News Reader

They've also had chemical weapon attacks which are scarier than gun attacks. Give me a person with a gun rather than some lethal chemical piped into the subway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_subway_sarin_attack

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I'm not sure if it should be scarier - the deadliest terrorist gas attack in Japan killed less people than the regularly scheduled weekly mass shooting in US usually does.

Not to minimise shootings, but at least you (or law enforcement) can shoot back, whereas with chemical attacks you cannot. The issue is really that you could scale chemical attacks up immensely and find some truly nasty chemical agents. I'm surprised it hasn't happened more - perhaps due to how dangerous working with extremely toxic chemicals actually is. Either way, wikipedia suggests 1k were injured in the attacks, so it's not just deaths. Imagine a terrorist who attacked with a chemical agent that just made you blind or gave you brain damage, but didn't kill you. Would that not be much scarier than being shot?

Someone did the math, scaling up chemical attacks is really hard because the stuff dissipates so quickly, even if you have something like sarin.

Also, it is really hard to gather the materials needed in the amounts necessary without raising suspicions, which also says a lot about how Japanese police handled the case.

Any link? Would be curious to read. That is, of course, good to hear.

There's this military historian perspective [1] on why chemical weapons aren't used by regular militaries becase they aren't actually that effective (compared to spending the same effort on making normal explosives). It is slightly different topic to terrorist attacks but I think it touched on that as well.

Be warned, the blog is a complete rabbit hole of "oh god why am I reading analysis of logistics of Lord of the Ring armies at 3 AM".

[1]: https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...

1995 was an eternity ago. Fewer than 100 people died. I am not scared of Japan, but I am scared of one country that has no gun control.

Whataboutism at its finest.

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