KINDA INTERESTING UPDATE:
Ahem:
And from last year…
So, it seems the overly armed feller from Indiana wasn’t likely going to the LA Gay Pride Parade to blow the place up. He was going there for… well, some other purpose. And he just happened to be hauling his guns and explosives along with him, because he’s apparently none too bright.
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After events earlier today in Orlando, police in Santa Monica, CA, arrested *another* guy *apparently* bent on causing havoc at a “Pride Parade” in Los Angeles. This guy, one James Howell, was from Indiana and had an “arsenal” of guns and a bucket of explosives, and apparently told the police that he wanted to “harm” the event.
You don’t often hear about “buckets” of explosives, but in this case it’s Tannerite. To me this seems a dubious choice for bomb making purposes… it’s a simple mix of aluminum powder and ammonium nitrate, used for exploding targets on a gun range. It’s not a particularly impressive explosive, and setting it off is a chore. Set fire to it? It doesn’t go off. Zap it with electricity? Nada. Whack it with a hammer? Snore. To get it to go off you have to hit it with a relatively powerful supersonic shock, such as you’d get with a rifle round. A pistol round probably won’t do it.
Since it’s a binary explosive, it’s brisance (shattering force) is not particularly good, but it’s heaving force is pretty good. As such it can be used to Blow Stuff Up Good if you use enough of it and shoot it with a high power rifle. Still, to make it really effective as a bomb you’d want to make a pipe bomb of it… which is a problem, since you have to actually shoot it. The pipe *might* play hell with the bullets ability to set off the Tannerite.
This seems like sloppy bomb making. Couple this with the fact that “James Howell” is a perfectly bland euro- American name, this doesn’t seem to indicate that this incident was ISIS inspired. If the bomber-to-be really was intending to set off a bomb and *isn’t* a Muslim, then things could get politically pretty interesting.