The Hill reports Student Who Allegedly Brought Gun to Class had AR-15, Grenades at Home.
The student did not “allegedly” bring a gun to school, it’s confirmed that he did. Until I see pictures or see a police report, the student allegedly had grenades and landmines.
This is what The Hill claims.
Eighteen-year-old Alwin Chen was arrested last Thursday after bringing a loaded handgun and a knife to Clarksburg High School.
According to multiple news reports Tuesday, he also had an AR-15-style rifle, grenades, land mines, a tactical vest and a list of grievances at home, along with other weapons.
Land Mines?
Did the student have land mines or a [detonator](C-4 detanator) for a [C-4](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C-4_(explosive%29) landmine?
C-4 is a type of plastic explosive that has a texture similar to modeling clay and can be molded into any desired shape. C-4 is stable and an explosion can only be initiated by a shock wave from a detonator.
Grenades? Land Mines? Can I Have a Picture?
The defense claims the weapons were properly licensed. To whom? Can one get a license for hand grenades? If so why?
Here is a Q&A discussion: Is it Legal to Own Hand Grenades?
What’s a Hand Grenade?
While it’s obvious that military-style grenades are illegal to possess, it’s not so obvious when dealing with other items that could, under the law’s definition, be classified as a grenade. What about a training device, or a smoke bomb, or even a firecracker? When faced with these questions, courts have come to inconsistent conclusions.
I am not down playing this story. It could have had a tragic ending as did the shooting in Florida. Perhaps the kid wanted to make a landmine of some sort, perhaps the detonator was for some other type of device.
It seems the kid did not have land mines and I question grenades. Pictures please.
I suspect that as a result of these stories, some action will be taken by Congress. Background checks at a minimum are on the way.
If Chen really did have commercial-grade grenades I would like to know how.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
Do you know how many AR-15’s are in the country? Approx. 15 million. Do you know how many rounds of ammunition are in the country? Untold billions. Do you know that you can cast your own bullets, buy or make powder, buy primers, reuse casings, etc.? Do you know how feeble and bloody any attempt at confiscation will be? Recently here in my area the police attempted to take an AR-15 from a man who was on the run for partner assault. It was a 3-day battle between him and dozens of LEO’s, with at least two of them shot. They finally got him when they set fire to his house. Extrapolate that by the 100 million gun owners in the country. Of course, only a small number are willing to do battle with the cops, but for those who do, how many cops are going to continue to risk their lives to confiscate weapons from law-abiding citizens?
Does Brit Hume suppose that the genie of cultural change can be put back in the bottle? And how long will that take to achieve – I assume we are talking about generations? Still a nice idea and meanwhile frequent mass shootings are a price well-worth paying are they? Quite obviously, just announcing something is outlawed is not sufficient to impose upon use but there are easy enough measures to take like controlling ammunition supply that would do a great deal to see the law upheld.
If people were sufficiently concerned about school shootings, they could change the culture enabling them very quickly. By homeschooling, online-schooling, or making it easier for kids who don’t like it where they’re at, to try their luck somewhere else, doing something else.
De facto forcing every kid to sit through indoctrination culturally amounting to: “You really ought to be shooting your classmates, if only you can manage to gain access to a tool to do it with” does have its downsides. No matter how helpful it may prove, in convincing less-than-literates to pump their fists, in favor of further restricting what tiny little sliver of freedom, the slave caste is still allowed to cling to.
Generalized mass shootings are most obviously deterred by enabling, and encouraging, those designated as victims, to arm themselves and become harder targets. You won’t stop someone determined to open fire from killing someone, but as long as at least some of the shooters’ fascination is driven by the notoriety of media attention to high counts of helpless victims, that motivator does become much less reliable.
Nothing particularly wrong with extending such encouragement to 14 and up kids (most school shootings seem to occur in teen-schools, not preschool) you send daily into the killing fields, either. But in that special case, it may just be better to avoid sending them there in the first place.
Pretty much throughout all recorded history, the solution that has proven to work for people (and honestly even animals) that are being victimized by someone stronger and better armed, is to get stronger and better armed themselves. Theeeeengz aaaaare diiiiiferent noooow, special snowflake progressive halfwits of course would neither know, understand nor care about any of that. But as those are the clowns who have created and fanned up under the current culture that is proving so dysfunctional; why the heck anyone even the tiniest bit less clueless, would give them even the time of day, is beyond me.
Montgomery County Maryland is very liberal and has strict gun control laws. Yet, obviously, people can easily get guns. Growing up, I had a couple of friends in High School who had AK-47’s.
I agree they need to control the ammunition to have any meaningful affect. it’s too late to outlaw the sale of military firearms. There are too many in circulation.
Does Brit Hume suppose that the genie of cultural change can be put back in the bottle? And how long will that take to achieve – I assume we are talking about generations? Still a nice idea and meanwhile frequent mass shootings are a price well-worth paying are they? Quite obviously, just announcing something is outlawed is not sufficient to impose upon use but there are easy enough measures to take like controlling ammunition supply that would do a great deal to see the law upheld.
We need to outlaw all guns! Then we will have no more killings, just like making some drugs illegal stopped the drug (opiod) epidemic. (sarc)
Brit Hume made a very sensible point about the current problems with the shootings. He pointed out that formerly more American households had guns, and there were much fewer gun laws, and yet there were no school or theater or those types of shootings. What changed? The culture has changed. That is what needs to be addressed to solve the problem. More gun restrictions will make Pelosi, Shumer and Bloomberg happy but will not do anything to solve the problem.
Well buying weapons on the darknet is much harder than all the other illegal stuff on there. I’d think you’d have to buy some of the guides on the markets to pull it off. But I did find this quote from the Berlusconi market, which is one of the major ones listed on Deep Dot Web.
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/maven-user-photos/mishtalk/economics/pY98QOHeFE2eAof6gA5bwQ/KXuxxU3MH0W53bOvxPhwkA
(I’d ehh understand if you would prefer this taken down, but the fact of the matter is the image above doesn’t contain “scarce information,” anyone could find this market through google – perhaps Mish this brings home the point I was making earlier about cryptocurrencies undermining state sovereignty?).
https://www.deepdotweb.com/2017/07/05/ireland-intensively-scan-packages-illegal-weapons/
That photo was an example – from Wikipedia – I wanted everyone to see wahjt we were talking about
can you get grenades? Land mines?
I believe the Hill hyped up this story, but I am curious if he had grenades how the hell he got them
As long as companies like CNN provide a path to 24/7 stardom, “those people” are going to keep doing this. I already posted Park Deitz’s advice.
I only have so many characters for a headline. But numerous guns and hand grenades seems like an arsenal to me especially if he had land mines and note that I never believed that story but it could be true. There are lots of questions here and I asked some of them
Congress will outlaw bump-fire devices to score political points without alienating too many gun lovers, even though they’ve only been involved in, what, one shooting rampage?
So….. you guys have never been to the dark webs have you. If you’re savvy enough you can literally get anything you want delivered to your door.
“Maryland Student Arrested Last Week had Arsenal and Grievance List”….. define Arsenal…
He could have had a small tactical nuclear device too but surely to goodness if he did that is not precluded by the 2nd. amendment so would it not be outrageous if now “some action will be taken by Congress”? The National Nuclear Device Association will not like that!
Unless we are talking about 2 part reactive target materials, which isn’t considered an explosive until mixed, and can be kept in a home that way. But that is a far cry from a grenade or C4.
There is such a thing as an explosive devices license, (Class III) but there is no scenario where a high school student could get one without lying and lots of money. It’s almost as difficult to get as a manufacturer’s license, and requires a background check by the ATF and a non-residential property to keep the explosives; so in the event you blow yourself up, you are unlikely to harm anyone else. You also have to demonstrate a ‘purpose’ (not a ‘need’) for pursuing such a high level weapons license. If that photo of the detonators was from this case, that alone is almost certainly a felony.