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Ted Nugent: If You're on Welfare You Shouldn't Be Allowed to Vote

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Orange Impostor12/04/2012 3:28:26 pm PST

re: #121 Obdicut

And so would a large amount of dynamite, or a big bunch of treacle.

Yeah. Because it’s really hard to refine and hard to weaponize and hard to spread.

Chemical and biological weapons, on the whole, are more ineffecient than conventional weapons.

Conceivably, anything could cause ‘mass destruction’, from Stay-Puft Marshmellows to hand grenades, if there were enough numbers and the conditiosn were right.

If someone has a sarin delivery system capable of killing tens of thousands, then that’s a weapon of mass destruction. If it’s capable of killing forty people, then it’s not.

There are orders of magnitude on how much sarin would be required to kill a large number of people versus how much dynamite or treacle. A backpack filled with explosives and shrapnel released in a crowded area could easily kill hundreds. That same backpack filled with refined sarin gas canisters would kill thousands to tens of thousands.

I’ve been on the receiving end of a hazmat-related forced evacuation of several city blocks due to an chlorine-gas leak (from a container roughly the size of a pressurized CO2 canister used for soft drink dispensing). From a chemical agent standpoint, this is pretty far down the food chain on lethality - yet dozens of people had to be treated for respiratory and skin contact.