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cbs12screengrab

Today it’s CBS’s turn to spread the FUD, with news (?) of a “gun” that can be made with items that you can purchase after you clear security at the airport. To make sure we’re on the government watchlist, here’s what you need to manufacture your airport gun: a hair dryer, some 9-volt batteries, an aluminum can, a magazine, a refrigerator magnet clip, dental floss, an anti-perspirant spray can, lithium batteries, some coins, water, and a condom. It looks like something that’d be as likely to kill you as anyone else, but according to CBS12, we should all be very afraid. Click the photo above or here to see the video, which offers Myspace among its “sharing” options, but won’t give me a simple embed code. . .

Today’s Lockdown of the Day is brought to you from Fort Pierce, Florida, where Lawnwood Elementary School (my home for 3rd, 5th, and 6th grade) was locked down for a bit over an hour Monday after a third-grade girl said she saw a man across the street with a shotgun. Law enforcement was called a few minutes before 11 a.m., and performed a room-by-room search of the school as well as a search of the wooded area across the street. No gunman was found, and no one else reported seeing the man. The lockdown was lifted a few minutes after noon. (Article behind a paywall, screengrab here.)

23e_print_xrayguns_com

A couple weeks back I told you about the artist in the UK that was x-raying guns for some sort of “consciousness-raising” project nonsense. Well, here in the U.S. we do things differently, because it’s capitalism, baby! The Firearm Blog covered that same UK story and had a guy in Mississippi reach out to them with his version. This gent has access to a CAT scanner, and his are for sale. Jump over to TFB for the rest of the story, or straight to his website or his Etsy store.

The Boulder (CO) Daily Camera’s Erie News went out of its way to headline that “Erie-based Magpul’s PMAG magazines used in Sandy Hook school massacre” on Monday. I guess that’s the “local interest” part of the story, but it’s interesting how they took a minor detail and used it to drag Magpul through the mud by associating their name with a crazed gunman while rehashing the whole sordid mess in Newtown. Not counting the headline, the article mentions “Magpul” or “PMAG” or both not less than five times in the section where they summarize the Sandy Hook report. Seems a little gratuitous, to me.

The laughing German Joerg Sprave is back with some upgrades to his spinning sewer pipe slingshot. Direct-drive wooden gears and super-fast rotation make for a pretty awesome setup.

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66 COMMENTS

  1. Almost anything can be used as a weapon if you are willing and creative enough, as stated above. That build is straight up MacGyver stuff right there.

    • The way I fugure it…

      1. Judging by the items that he bought that gun cost more than $500 dollars to build…

      2. What we have here is a single use item that is more explosive than gun, and though the projectile does go through the barrier by the looks of it so would the following items…a BB, a knife, a plastic spork and jello. What would be accomplished by using this device is a few minor cuts and scrapes and a number of singed eyebrows. But we did scare the uninformed public during the busiest traveling days of the year! Channel 12 news…job done!

  4. Not counting the headline, the article mentions “Magpul” or “PMAG” or both not less than five times

    I think that Magpul should retaliate by leaving Colorado.

    Which will happen in the reign of Queen Dick.

    • Magpul seems to like it there now.
      I’m just wondering about the real culprit here–the black Honda Civic.
      We can’t ignore the fact that a black Honda Civic carried the guns and a troubled youth to the scene. This tactical black Honda Civic never belonged in the hands of a troubled child. And think about this: the black Honda Civic held enough gas to reach several different schools on a single tankful. Does anyone really need a black Honda Civic capable of carrying concealed assault weapons in the trunk, able to travel between home and school on a mere gallon of gas completely under the radar, and so easy to operate that even a troubled child can do it. A black Honda Civic clearly put a troubled kid in that school. When will we finally get these black Honda Civics off the road and into the crushers where they can do no harm.

      • I agree! We need mental health checks for these tactical Hondas and we should also host a black Honda civic buy back. We also need to reduce their high capacity gas tanks to 1/2 gallon. Nobody needs over 1/2 gallon anyways. What on earth are people going to do with a 16 gallon tank?? 16 gallons of gasoline?? – that is a ticking time bomb. We need to stop this – think about the children.

    • I think it would behoove Magpul to make a very BIG point of how many hundreds of thousands (millions?) of their ultra high capacity assault banana magazine clips have NEVER been used in the commission of any crime. I rather think it would be a good idea for Bushmaster to do the same. As for Honda, I’ll worry about them when the Japanese have their natural RKBA back.

    • I mean it looks like if you tried to use it for evil purposes, you’d be as likely to blow yourself up as do harm to your intended target. The way it exploded, you’d certainly have flash burns to your face, and you may not have all your digits afterwards.

      • That was my thought as well, more harm to the shooter than anyone else.
        I wouldn’t fire that contraption for fear for my own safety.

    • And then of course you could always smuggle a slingshot through security. Plastic handle, elastic bands that are invisible, all you need is a sufficiently weighty and compact projectile. If David could slay Goliath with a slung shot….

  6. Joerg and the guy making weapons out of airport gift store items gives me hope for mankind. You only think I am kidding. The inventiveness and ingenuity are such natively human things, particularly if you look at it from sort of an anthropological perspective. I see those videos and I think about the first paleolithic guy who picked up a sharp piece of flint and went “hmmm….”

    • Yeah, but for every one of those guys there’s the guy that first looked at an oyster and went, “Hmmm…”

      I mean, really, wtf was that guy thinking?

      • Oyster? That was child’s play. Let’s talk about blow fish. How many people had to die to figure out you could eat the fish if you precisely removed a certain part? Maybe it went like this: prisoners are being starved; they are offered fish that that they know is poisonious; every now and then a person survives eating the fish; and this leads to the guards discovering the parts of the blow fish that are safe to eat.

        • Either God created everybody and said, “Eat this, this, and this, and don’t eat that, that, or that.”
          Or people evolved from proto-hominids who ate what smelled good and tasted good and spat out what didn’t.

      • And my wife thinks I’m nuts for making statements like that about various food items. My normal example is the potato: “maybe I can eat this rock I just dug up”

        I’m going to use you as an example of why I’m not nuts. Wait….

        • Well, for most things like that, I assume the early humans got it from seeing an animal eat it first. There are animals that dig up and eat tubers. But who saw an animal eat an oyster? The only animals I know that eat oysters that would have also been visible to early humans are maybe sea otters?

          Alternately, it was by sticking everything they found in their mouths, like an infant.

          • I’ll go with the sea otter hypothesis but I’d have to be awfully hungry to eat an oyster. Or an insect. In Thailand, insects are a regular part of their diet. But that’s where the Thai stick is and the $10.00 hookers really love their work, or are very convincing actresses, so the trade-off is worth it. <leer, snort>
            Meat is very expensive, because the water buffalo are much more valuable as beasts of burden, but insects are free, as are feral dogs in Korea.

            Once, at a house where I was renting a room, there was a stump that the owner was just letting rot out. One day, I was out there with his ax just chopping away at it for the fun of it, and I spotted a grub about the size of the last 2/3 of my little finger. I found myself wondering if it’d make good eating, but then the part of my brain that actually does the thinking said, “WTF, are you f’in nuts?”

    • That one might be easier to understand. We’ve spent most of our history starving. Though you do have to wonder about some things, I guess.

    • I think the tipping point between proto-hominids and humans happened when some curious, hungry proto-hominid smelled cooked meat in the embers of some natural forest fire, and kept an ember going so that everybody could have cooked meat and stay warm at night.

      Why do you think Zeus threw Prometheus out of the Olympian bureaucracy? Zeus wanted to dictate what everybody ate, and Prometheus gave us the power to decide for ourselves. Poof! Liberty was born! And Zeus didn’t like that one bit! So he’s been fighting against Liberty since forever.

      And it has taken people all of this long time to finally realize that nobody needs some authoritarian telling them what to do.

  9. In any large airport there are a few dozen restaurants. Are we to believe that the cooks in these restaurants all use plastic sporks and dull butter knives in the back kitchen area??

    BS – airport “security” is a farce for the weak minded that are too ignorant to think beyond whatever reality tv show the networks are pumping out these days.

    • I don’t know about the kitchen area, but I know the Chili’s in the Atlanta Airport doesn’t even give you butter knives in the dining room. Metal fork, plastic knife.

      • Use the fork to stab the cook in the eye and take his chef’s knife. The fork is the FP-45 Liberator of the cutlery world.

  10. During a layover, inside the ‘secure’ area of the airport in London, We were eating dinner at a nice restaurant. Cutting my steak with a really nice, pointy, serrated steak knife.
    My buddy and I thought the same thing at the same time.
    Hmm, who’d a thunk, We did NOT have to be unarmed on the flight.

  11. Picking on Magpul,due to the fact that they have left for more free markets,and taken a lot of would have been tax revenue,that would have probably been used for socialistic means,with them,so now they are ringing their hands and trying to make the folks at Magpul look like the bad guys.Be prepared and ready.Keep your powder dry.

      • I believe they’ve moved all of their manufacturing out of the state, but their corporate headquarters is still in Erie.

        • Do you know what state they moved manufacturing to? Or better yet, do you have a link to a press release somewhere? Not trying to be obnoxious, just curious.

  12. This reminds me of an article or video I saw ( possibly the same guy) that pointed out how many janitorial carts with cleaning chemicals were scattered throughout the terminal unattended. A little bleach and ammonia goes along way at 40000 ft. in a pressurized cabin.

    • Right after the Boston Marathon bombing the ATF (unarmed division) showed up in my son’s organic chem lab at school and confiscated all the explosive precursors. This was a typical unthinking bureaucratic response to a problem. Here you have a bunch of graduate students who could go to Home Depot and a grocery store and find the materials to make not only explosives but chemical warfare agents as well.

    • But…but….EXPLOSIVE DECOMPRESSION!!!!1one

      Really, on a straight up comparison basis, I’d be worried more about the bomb. And having tutored chemistry for both high school and university students, I’m not even concerned about the bomb….

  13. i have one of teh shirts from xrayguns. he is a nice dude. when you said it awhile back, matt. i mentioned it in the comments here.

  14. I actually enjoy watching Parks and Recreation. A recent Ron Swanson quote, which I loved, was along the lines of, “That folder in my hands is more dangerous than this bow in yours.” To paraphrase the character, anything is a weapon.

  15. There have been a lot of these “stories” running in various news outlets lately. It is no coincidence that these stories are coming right before one of the busiest travel days of the year. This week, many people are taking the only plane trip they will make all year, and the media are playing on these people’s emotions with an extra dose of FUD.

    I have no doubt that the 4th estate is fully complicit in fomenting fear among the masses.

  16. Has there ever been an incident where:

    1. There was a report of a gunman, but no shots fired;
    2. The area was then locked down by police and saturated with SWAT;
    3. Sometime over an hour later SWAT, in searching room to room, comes across and apprehends a guy actually loaded for bear in preparation for a mass shooting?

    I’m just trying to figure out why this particular pattern seems to be standard procedure.

  17. OK someone clear up what is obviously a gap in my knowledge of gun related lexicon. What the hell does FUD mean?

  19. Hey folks, don’t panic.

    It clearly says that one of the parts needed for this hybrid gun/bomb is a magazine. And we already have a magazine ban in some parts of the country. So we are all right.

    [OK I will quit doing my Diana DeGette imitation now.]

  20. Looks more like a device to lose some fingers and an eyebrow than a firearm to me. Ain’t no cure for stupid.

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