re: #4 goddamnedfrank

No, it really doesn’t. The Swiss tag explosives, including blasting powders, but not smokeless or black powder propellants designed for reloading firearms.

Try again.

They (the Swiss) tag explosives. The explosives don’t have problems with detonation. The Swiss presently have other means of controlling firearms, making ammunition powders an effort and expense with little gain.

As to the unsafe, there’s a lot of opinion from the NRA of how this, that, and the other technique (melamine plastic, haptens, and isotopes) would be too expensive to implement, might foul weapons in use, could be found and removed by dedicated villains — all without a study or test showing such effects.

IN fact I rather loved the way the 1998 “Marking, Rendering Inert, and Licensing of Explosive Materials”, officially by the National Research Council but funded by the NRA, said isotopes would avoid all the problems, so we’d have to worry about decontaminating every site where explosives were used so as to avoid cross-contamination. Why do I think this is ridiculous? See DNA and fingerprint analysis from high traffic areas. The people who had to do the sorting would do so. “It’s too hard” is a cop-out.

Your first objection was that the taggants were volatile and would explode. I countered by pointing to others, and noted they’re in use by the Swiss. You once more slapped a blanket objection. I recognize your bias is against any controls at all. Unfortunately when you hold “all or nothing” stances they can wind up giving you nothing. I’d rather taggants than just making firearms or possession of ammunition illegal. Taggants are harder to make work but they beat the crap out of the other options.