By Doug Porter
Investigators pursuing forensic evidence in the Boston Marathon Bombing case have already determined that the devices used consisted of gunpowder packed into at least one pressure cooker along with pieces of metal, nails and ball bearings.
Were it not for the repeated efforts of the National Rifle Association, authorities could trace the manufacturer and possibly even the chain of custody of the gunpowder used to kill three people and injure more than 170 on Sunday.
Thanks to lobbying by the NRA, explosive makers are not required to place tracing elements called taggants in gunpowder. Plastic explosives and non-gunpowder detonators are all required by law to contain these tracing elements.
On two occasions over the past five decades lawmakers attempting to mandate the use of identification taggants have run into a buzz saw of disinformation distributed by gun lobby supporters falsely claiming the microscopic color-coded particles would somehow impair performance. From a MSNBC report:
The first time came more than thirty years ago, after a wave of bombings in the 1970s mainly by the radical left Weather Underground and Puerto Rican nationalist groups.
A congressional study in 1980 found: “Identification taggants would facilitate the investigation of almost all significant criminal bombings in which commercial explosives were used.”
But the NRA successfully lobbied to have black and smokeless gunpowders exempted from the explosives required to include taggant markers. Members of Congress—including then-New York Rep. Charles Schumer– tried and failed again after the 1993 New York Citytruck bombing of the World Trade Center. The Clinton administration renewed the call for legislation requiring identifying taggants right after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, whose 18th anniversary is Friday.
And So It Goes
Within a couple of days the nation got to see heroism on the streets of Boston and cowardice in the halls of Congress. From the Washington Post:
President Obama’s ambitious effort to overhaul the nation’s gun laws in response to December’s school massacre in Connecticutsuffered a resounding defeat Wednesday, when every major proposal he championed fell apart on the Senate floor.
It was a stunning collapse for gun-control advocates just four months after the deaths of 20 children and six adults in Newtown led the president and many others to believe that the political climate on guns had been altered in their favor.
Feinstein Spits Fire
President Obama was visibly angry at a White House briefing following the Senate showdowns, calling out the NRA by name for willfully disseminating false information on background checks.
California Senator Diane Feinstein also didn’t react well to her ban on assault rifles going down to defeat. From the San Francisco Chronicle:
Fire-spitting angry, Sen. Dianne Feinstein told her Senate colleagues to “show some guts” as her ban on assault weapons failed in the Senate on Wednesday in the face of relentless opposition from the National Rifle Association.
The California Democrat was in full fury, spilling a stream of outrage beyond the mere two minutes allowed on her amendment to gun legislation that was crafted in response to the massacre of 20 schoolchildren and six adults in Newtown, Conn., four months ago.
…
The 1994 ban passed by one vote on a simple majority. It expired a decade later. Her new version required, like virtually all legislation in the Senate these days, 60 votes, because everything is routinely blocked by filibuster. It didn’t come close, failing 40-60 against a solid phalanx of Republicans and a 15-vote contingent of Democrats from gun-friendly rural states.
Gabby Giffords Responds
The sad and sometimes tearful faces of the Newtown parents who joined the President yesterday as he reacted to the loss in the Senate were eclipsed by the sorrow evident in Gabby Giffords, the former Congresswoman who survived a mass shooting.
From her op-ed in today’s New York Times:
They looked at these most benign and practical of solutions, offered by moderates from each party, and then they looked over their shoulder at the powerful, shadowy gun lobby — and brought shame on themselves and our government itself by choosing to do nothing.
They will try to hide their decision behind grand talk, behind willfully false accounts of what the bill might have done — trust me, I know how politicians talk when they want to distract you — but their decision was based on a misplaced sense of self-interest. I say misplaced, because to preserve their dignity and their legacy, they should have heeded the voices of their constituents. They should have honored the legacy of the thousands of victims of gun violence and their families, who have begged for action, not because it would bring their loved ones back, but so that others might be spared their agony.
This defeat is only the latest chapter of what I’ve always known would be a long, hard haul. Our democracy’s history is littered with names we neither remember nor celebrate — people who stood in the way of progress while protecting the powerful. On Wednesday, a number of senators voted to join that list.
Meanwhile in Boston
CNN, Fox News and the Associated Press all were forced to walk back reports filed on Tuesday claiming that an arrest had been made in the Boston Marathon bombings. The cable network news outfit took the brunt of criticism for airing the story in error, with a CNN source telling Business Insider, “As I think everyone knows, we really f—ed up. No way around it”.
The network later defended its decision, claiming three credible sources on both local and federal levels had verified the arrest.
Sifting Through the Evidence
A promised late day press conference by authorities in Boston on Tuesday never materialized. Many in the media believed that a suspect, who police have not been able to identify, would be discussed at that time.
For now, here’s the most succinct reportage I saw this morning, from the Los Angeles Times:
Authorities have obtained clear images of the faces of two men with backpacks who they believe were acting suspiciously around the time of the Boston Marathon bombings, a potential breakthrough in the search to find who planted the deadly devices, sources familiar with the investigation said Wednesday.
A department store surveillance camera caught an image of at least one of the men leaving a backpack near the finish line, a federal law enforcement official said.
Another official briefed on the investigation said the image that shows two men is the first indication that more than one bomber may have been responsible for the attacks that killed three people and injured more than 170 at Monday’s race.
‘Political Retribution’, Filner Style
San Diego City Beat nails it this week with an editorial discussing Mayor Bob Filner’s proposed budget, the one that earned him the “petty” moniker from the UT-San Diego:
On Monday, Filner unveiled his proposed budget for the fiscal year that begins on July 1, and it includes a cut of $1.4 million to the City Attorney’s office amid the mayor’s plan to solve a $38.4-million deficit. Howls of protest came immediately from the pro-businessLincoln Club of San Diego County, whose president, T.J. Zane, charged that Filner’s proposal “appears to be nothing more than political retribution.”
…
Now, do we think it’s possible that Filner was wearing his signature ear-to-ear grin while he was approving the proposal to cut Goldsmith’s budget. Yeah. We think that’s very possible. Filner’s clearly no fan of the city attorney, and his brand of politics can be hardball. But the cuts are also easily defensible.
…
Goldsmith’s defenders shouldn’t fret, though: There’s no way the City Council’s going to go along with Filner’s idea—Council President Todd Gloria has already hinted as much. If the council restores that $1.4 million, we fear that it might see another line item as an easy offsetting cut: the $1.3 million Filner has proposed to make the emergency winter homeless shelter a year-round facility.
So, the bottom line here is that it’s possible that San Diego’s homeless will get left in the cold so a bloated city agency that seen increases in staffing (because it is headed by a Republican, with a GOP mayor in charge) as libraries were cut back and life guards were pulled off the beaches. And that’s before we even get to the question of whether taxpayers have been getting their money’s worth, as the actual performance of the City Attorney’s office has been questionable at best.
Casino Pauma Organizing Campaign Underway
I made the long haul out to Pauma yesterday for an event announcing UNITE HERE Local 30’s organizing drive for casino employees. Members of the Interfaith Committee for Worker Justice (ICWJ), including Rabbi Laurie Coskey, stood by as organizers eagerly counted petitions signed by 149 of the casino’s 226 employees asking management to commit to a fair process without interference or intimidation.
The ICWJ later delivered a letter to representatives of the Pauma Tribe informing them of the petition drive’s results.
This was emotional moment for two dozen or so Casino workers and their families who showed up for this event. If you haven’t been through this process there is no way you can understand the fear associated with making the decision to join a union in a non-unionized workplace.
The employees that got up to speak in front of the group all showed great courage, realizing that their resolution to organize could have consequences that would threaten their families’ security. Most of them have worked for Pauma Casino for more than eight years.
This is a story complicated by the fact that collective bargaining rules at Native American casinos on tribal lands are different, owing to the tribes’ sovereign status. I’ll be reporting more on this rather unusual situation in coming weeks.
Issa’s Big Campaign Bucks in the Bank
Quarterly fundraising reports for federal candidates, covering the period of Jan. 1 through March 31, were released by the Federal Elections Commission this week.
Congressman Darrell Issa, who resides in one of the safest Republican districts in California, has a huge amount of campaign money just hanging out in his bank account. His slush fund exceeds that of House Speaker John Boehner ($1,822,000). Not that Issa’s a toady for special interests, or anything….
Here’s the numbers for our local Congresscritters:
CA- District 49- Darrell E. Issa $1,918,000
CA- District 50- Duncan D. Hunter $131,000
CA- District 51- Juan C. Vargas $1,000
CA- District 52- Scott Peters $220,000
CA- District 53- Susan A. Davis $169,000
On This Day: 1906 – San Francisco was hit with an earthquake. The original death toll was cited at about 700. Later information indicated that the death toll may have been 3 to 4 times the original estimate. 1939 – Gene Autry recorded “Back in the Saddle Again.” 1983 – The U.S. Embassy in Beirut was blown up by a suicide car-bomber. 63 people were killed including 17 Americans.
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Doug Porter
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Porter delivers another NRA outrage, new to me, that the gun lobby finds tracing chemicals in gunpowder an invasion of privacy. Surely, the gun Senators and the gun Representatives are going to have a tougher and tougher time getting elected as they pursue the NRA’s increasingly remote and arcane agenda, and will demand more and more money from their primarily conservative financiers to maintain their hold on their offices. We can adopt Grover Norquist’s starve-the-beast tactic aimed at federal and state governments and require the anti-democrats who run this country to spend more and more of their money trying to do it.
I respect Jan Goldsmith, if not the job he’s been doing. He at least answers questions openly–according to the letter of the law if not the spirit. In my dealings with him I’ve found him to be a pretty stand-up guy, even if I do disagree with most of his policy positions and have some questions about some legal opinions to come out of his office. But the opposition to cuts to his department when all other City departments have been slashed are ridiculous and smacks of nothing more than brash partisanship. And when Todd Gloria comes out in opposition to those cuts, we’ll know for sure what side of the political aisle he’s really on.
In fairness, it should be noted that the criticism of the budget cuts to the City Attorney’s office are NOT coming from the City Attorney himself or his office. At least not to my knowledge. That just wouldn’t be Goldsmith’s style.
Kudos to the CityBeat staff (Dave Rolland, Kelly Davis, et al) for putting together a pretty poignant piece.
More misinformation on the NRA. This time, the National Research Council, the research body of the National Academy of Sciences backs the NRA on taggants:
the NRC created the Committee on Smokeless and Black Powder which conducted the research and wrote the final report. In that final report, which was reviewed by an independent panel of experts with diverse perspectives and technical expertise, included the following findings:
Bombs using black and smokeless powders account for a small number of deaths and injuries each year. (Annually, 10 deaths and approximately 100 injuries.)
Information gathered by the BATF and the FBI regarding bombings is incomplete.
An effective taggant system with the associated record keeping would incur significant costs.
No taggant system has been found that is technically feasible for use in black and smokeless powders.
The Committee specifically recommended:
“Detection markers in black and smokeless powder should not be implemented at the present time.”
“Identification taggants in black and smokeless powder should not be implemented at the present time.”
Oh how the NRA loves to twist the truth.
The CONCLUSION of their recommendations was : “Identification taggants and an associated record-keeping system could be of further assistance in tracking down bombers in cases where basic forensic techniques fail.”
The report also suggested further research on the subject.
Further research on the subject was blocked at the appropriations committee level by NRA lobbyists.
Where are you getting the specific recommendation (out of the other recommendations) that you quote (so I can read it), and are you saying that the NRA “lobbyists” blocked the NRC/NAS research, or other research? Please provide a link to this as well. Thank you.
here’s your first link. here’s your second link
Thanks for the links. I read some of the text of the actual report. I read as much of the Executive Summary as I could stand (skimmed it all) and the chapter dealing with identification. The Committee stated that it wasn’t cost effective at the time to use taggants, nor were they viable for safety, cost, lack of facts/research and other reasons to implement at that time. They did state, however, that if bombings that were (and still are) rare at the time increased enough to change the “cost-effect” consideration, then it may be feasible to implement taggants at some time in the future.
While I didn’t finish with your first link, your second link makes no sense unless I’m missing something. First, a Seattle Times article about the NRA and guns? Not exactly a neutral source. Not even taking into consideration that some 89% of reporters self identify as democratic or liberal/”progressive”. They are talking about/writing about the BATF and taggants in the 1970’s. And then a _1980_ report from “congressional investigators” that reported that more study was needed, but could be completed in time for using taggants in 1984 (4 years later? 3-4 more years of study?)
“Instead, Congress cut off all spending on the taggant program.”
Yet, you state, “Further research on the subject was blocked at the appropriations committee level by NRA lobbyists.” which isn’t in the link you provided. What is in the link, however, is this:
“The NRA was pretty vocal,” said Jim Pasco, a former BATF assistant director who is now executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police. “This would have been one tremendous leap forward, and it was just stopped cold.”
It’s also interesting to note that Pasco, a lobbyist, is a former BATF (now BATFE) assistant director, an organization that regulates Federal Firearms Licensees (and has been very aggressive in their regulation at times in the past, and if you ask some of the FFL holders now, are just as aggressive as ever), and an organization that is at odds with the NRA, an organization that defends FFL holders in court, through Congress and through legislation, making it no friend of the BATFE.
So the 1970’s/1980 time frame, the NAS report says:
“Copyright 1998 by the National Academy of Sciences. All rights reserved.”
Perhaps Clinton let the issue die instead? The NRA would fight tooth and nail before allowing taggants or anything else in gun powder that had any danger possibility. Also, the other issue, the “registration”/tracing issue pops up here. It is and has been for a number of years, illegal to create any type of registry that can be used to trace/track civilian arms. Yet the NAS report itself states that it is necessary for accurate records from manufacturer to end user for taggants to work. It is also necessary to trace the taggant lace powder from end user back to manufacturer. If you can do that, you can trace both fully manufactured ammo as well as home/hobby/cost reloaders at home through the powder. There would have to be a registry of end users purchasing the powder from retailers/wholesalers/gun shows, whatever the source.
The report also says that taggants “can” be used, if developed and safe eventually, in lieu of other forensic techniques (or the other way around). And what do we have a day or two later?
Pictures of the suspects being circulated, asking for the public’s help in identifying the perps. Looks like basic forensic techniques and plain old fashioned detective work works after all.
btw, the report also states that the powder manufacturers are using color (back then) to identify their powders from other manufacturers. I’ve seen a review where the reviewer identified the powder manufacturer for a generic/reseller of ammo just from the shape of the smokeless pellets.
Quibble with the labels and piddle with the details all you want.
Is this clear enough for you?
The leadership of the NRA–not its membership– has taken actions that ultimately have aided and abetted terrorists. Who says so? I do.
Now go sow your disinformation somewhere else.
So which anti-gun group did you get the taggant issue from? The simulataneous appearance of this issue, I thought at first was one reporter copying another, but it’s too widespread and too coincidental, especially for an obscure issue like taggants for this not to be organized. I checked Media Matters, where a lot of the anti-gun reasearch and talking points originate (Bloomberg and Soros investment well spent there), but no taggant taklking points there unless I missed it. The wording of your post suggests an anti-gun org behind it, not original research/posting.
The purpose of my column –clearly stated every M-F when it’s posted–is to review the days’ news reports. So of course the research isn’t original. Neither is your attempt to derail this discussion.
“I read the Daily Fishwrap(s) so you don’t have to… “
I enjoy the debate – and given the seriousness with which some folks take this debate, challenging “facts” in our fact challenged times seems expected. I have trouble with the idea of “pro-gun” because I can’t get “Happiness is a Warm Gun” from the Beatles out of my head. For a hundred years progress in the west was defined as fewer guns. Safe communities with brave citizens, at least brave enough to not find it necessary to arm themselves against their neighbors. But now, for many it seems the superior value is loving their gun. Oops, that would be rifle (or pistol) the one used for fighting. As a child I was taught about an eternal struggle between good and evil. After a half century I understand that struggle, I’ve seen that struggle and how hard it is to tell the difference. But I’ve learned to judge people by what the do and what they value. So where’s that place the NRA? Are the issues in front of us today about saving old rural traditions? No, not really. About the ability to defend one’s self and one’s home. No, as Biden recommends, the best urban defensive weapon is a shotgun. Large magazines and weapons that spray bullets are for aggression – to attack, and not deer but people. Not a surprise in our violenced saturated society, but Biff, ask yourself – is a gun the most important thing in your life? In society? More important than anything else? The NRA and the so-called gun nuts have declared it as the breakpoint issue. But as for me, I have had it with those who claim a right to hate and fear. There is nothing and I mean nothing in front of us today that hasn’t been the law of the land before under the same Constitution. The NRA’s skewed Constitutional interpretation is not a right – it’s a death sentence for us all.
And so Mr. 9mm (NRA defenders) will strike down his enemies with great vengence…blah blah blah, Pulp Fiction. And nothing changes, and more people die needlessly because of the tyranny of the weak (NRA). I want to live in world where ideas are strong and tolerance is great, not a world where guns determine who leads, who dies and who is right.
Let’s face it. Most Congressmen are in their business to profit from it themselves in a self serving way. They make the really big money when they leave office “in order to spend more time with their families” and hire on as a lobbyist providing they have voted the right way while in office. If they voted for gun control, they’d lose out on all that good lobbyist money. They don’t mind being voted out of office as long as they can score a great job as a lobbyist.
Probably more like ALL. Why in the world would a truly honest person even pick politics/public office as a career? Even the people I vote for I would probably never be willing to sit down and share a drink with them. Guess I’m a compulsive pessimist.
Let’s Use Some of This Sadness To Help Prevent More Killing At Home & Abroad!
by John Falchi (Notes) on Saturday, April 20, 2013 at 1:25am
Dear Friends-
During the past few days many of us have been glued to our tv sets, computers, or smart phones in order to watch the ongoing drama of the dastardly act of the exploding of two highly powerful, home-made bombs in the midst of a large concentration of people at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, and the subsequent investigation and tracking down of the suspected killers. Because we have been allowed by our government to see the actual injuries and deaths that these murderous individuals have caused, unlike the results of our bombings in other countries, we have felt the grief of the victims and their relatives and close friends, and want to do everything we can to keep it from happening again.
If anything, this horrific attack on innocent people at the Boston Marathon should raise our consciousness about the type of daily killing, in our name, that our government engages in, regularly, around the world, and in particular in Pakistan and Afghanistan, today. We can’t imagine what it is like to hear drones overhead twenty four hours a day and know that they could strike at any moment just because you behave in a certain way. As S. Brian Willson who is a Viet Nam veteran and peace activist writes, ”We are not worth more. They are not worth less.”
The Boston Bombing should remind us of this violence that the US inflicts every day in other parts of the world, and which we are now doing by remote control from Arizona. We do this by “Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, a fancy name for drones, without risking one single life on our part, but risking the lives of many thousands of innocent people who happen to live near places where our purported enemies are located.
Make no mistake about it, there are serious reasons why we have engaged in battle in the countries of Iraq and Afghanistan, recently, and not in a country like Ruanda where millions were killing each other just a few short years ago. Many of those we have killed live in countries that have failed to follow the dictates of our multi-national corporations who would like to capture the remnants of ancient sunlight that representatives of these companies have found buried beneath those countries’ soil.
We hope that, rather than turning to nationalism as we did in 2001, and commission our mighty forces to take our revenge out on the Chechen people with a “shock and awe demonstration,” instead, that we treat this recent horrendous act in Boston as the crime that it is, and try in our courts the perpetrator that we have managed to capture alive , and punish him, accordingly, if and when he is found guilty. By treating of this dastardly act of violence in this way, we will demonstrate a much deeper understanding of what others experience at the hands of the United States. Let us take some of this sadness and use it to spur us to prevent more killing at home and abroad.