Ah, peroxyacetone...

Well, well, well, a terror suspect apprehended buying hair and nail care products - will wonders never cease. Just as a quick note, in case anyone was wondering, he was trying to make peroxyacetone - a highly explosive and none-to-stable compound that is really easy to make. In fact, it's what the train bombers in Britain used a few years back.

I made some in lab this summer for a demonstration in chemistry, and, oh boy, is it ever fun. I had about a 2 gram pile of it on a 4"x4"x0.5" pine board (to protect the lab bench). 2 grams takes up about a half a golf ball sized pile (it is kind of fluffy - you could try to compress it into a smaller container, but I wouldn't risk that after it was dry, it would likely blow up while you were tamping it down). With ear plugs and the class well back, I had a lit match taped to the end of a 2 meter long stick - a touch of the match to the pile and BOOM!
goodbye board, meter stick, filter paper (that the substance was drying on) - the reaction was so energetic, it actually disintegrated most of the filter paper except for the parts that were actually driven into the board (and if you know anything about momentum, you know this takes a lot of force to drive paper into the grain of a pine wood board), the small board was shattered into three pieces, one of which flew 15 feet and landed in a student's lap, and scared the bejeezus out of the entire third floor. I felt the pressure wave (albeit only slightly) from seven feet away. Good times.

But seriously, this is dangerous stuff, and the guy was buying chemicals in quantities to make a lot - at least 100 times what I made, just in the one video purchase that they show on TV. It is really easy to make - mix fairly concentrated hydrogen peroxide and plain old acetone and add a couple of drops of something else, and, Presto! it precipitates out of the solution (no, I am not going to tell you the proportions, or the secret ingredient, or the concentration of H2O2 - if you want to blow yourself or someone else up, F--- Off! somebody else online will help you, but you can be damn well certain it isn't going to be me).

Why am I writing all this? I really don't know - just trying to indicate that almost anything can be made into a weapon if you want it to - ban guns and scary knives and chemicals all you want - bad people still do bad things. And yes, I am calling him bad - he isn't misunderstood or manipulated by his religion - he gravitated to this kind of ideology based on who he is. Most followers of Islam are not bad people, as are most Christians, Jews, Deists, Buddhists, Atheists, etc (I say not bad because it requires effort to actually be good - so I would say most people qualify as basically not bad). Bad ones are drawn to extremism - whether it is bombing the World Trade Center or an abortion clinic. It isn't the religion that causes the violence, it is the people - we could all be secular humanists and I would contend that there would still be violence; in fact, the most wholesale slaughters of the twentieth century were perpetrated by people who ascribed to no particular faith (Mao, Lenin, and Stalin - all of whom said that religion should be done away with). They did away with religion, and managed to wreak more havoc in a shorter time than most major religions ever have over their entire history - even the Crusades did not have the body count that any of the big three above did. (Liberal estimates of the death toll on both sides gets to about 3,000,000 - but most likely these are overestimates, because counting issues at this time were suspect at best)

I don't really know where I am going with this other than to say that humans seem to have a very violent streak - religions and societies at once have a mitigating effect and at other times seem to exacerbate the issue - which is why one cannot blame society or religion. Both of these are constructs created by people (while I do believe in God, spirituality, etc., religions are the human constructs for communal expression of their spiritual nature), and it is the people who are the issue- those suspicious of organizations, corporations, religions, etc seem to often forget that they do not exist independently of people, and that they are just a reflection of the dual nature of humanity. (BTW, if you want more non-religious massacres, I can get them any time - the Hutus massacring hundreds of thousands of Tsutsis, for example, based on tribalism, Pol Pot killing intellectuals, French killing British, British killing French, etc., etc., etc.)

Oh, well, we muddle through as best we can...