Teaching the Kids to Build Pipe Bombs
Via Uncle:
Dad, mom accused of teaching son, friends how to make explosives
A Prior Lake couple allegedly thought it would be “a good educational tool” for their son and his friends to learn how to make homemade explosives from PVC pipe and gunpowder.
They had no idea, they reportedly said, that the teens would go on a destructive spree, using pipe bombs to explode mailboxes in Burnsville, Lakeville and rural Scott County.
I must admit that I’m not quite sure what to think about this. My guess is that the typical knee-jerk reaction to this is quite negative. Blowing up mail boxes? Obviously wrong. But I’m not so sure about teaching kids to build pipe bombs.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with pipe bombs. It’s what you do with the pipe bombs that matters.
If someone taught their kids to hand-load rifle ammunition, and the kids then used that ammo to shoot out windows in local buildings, we wouldn’t claim teaching kids to hand-load was wrong, would we? We wouldn’t claim that hand-loaded ammo was bad.
Obviously, parents need to be responsible and use their best judgment with their kids. And it apparently failed in this case.
For the record, I would have no concern about my son learning to build pipe bombs. I haven’t taught him that yet, but if/when I do I’m quite confident that he won’t do anything wrong with that knowledge.
What do readers think?
[...] What do you guys think about this? [...]
I learned how to make that sort of thing when I was a kid. We blew up stumps and model ships. I fully plan on teaching my boy how to make that sort of thing.
Playing with stuff that burns or bangs is fun – the only other really fun stuff is electricity – tesla coils and the like. There’s no reason, in my mind, why you shouldn’t learn about it. The only downside is that by the time my son is old enough – another four or five years – I’ll likely get raided by DHS swat teams if I try to buy saltpeter.
It’s a free country… ha, just kidding.
Nothing wrong with the teaching & educating. But be the wise parent to decide at what age your child is mature enough to handle the knowledge. Not everyone matures at the same rate.
The problem is people don’t think that they should be held
responsible for what they do. Not only children but many
if most adults also. As a child I and most my age had
access to guns and other things but we did not go shooting
up the neighborhood. We would have been held accountable
by our parents let alone the police. I know that I would not
been able to sit for a week if I did anything that I should
not have.
When I was a kid, we used to play with firecrackers, including M-80s. It didn’t take us long (like age 12 or 13) to figure we could open up lesser fireworks, extract the powder, and make bigger boomers! We were probably actually lucky to not have blown body parts off, although one of our friends had a zip gun explode on him and he eventually lost two fingers due to infection from the powder burns. Of course, he had used copper tubing for his barrel for his .22 cal zip gun pistol, and the copper wasn’t strong enough to contain the explosion from a .22 pistol round. Not that the rest of us didn’t warn him. Also had another kid almost lose an eye when a piece of glass from an exploding milk bottle (we only used a Black Cat in that one) hit him in the forehead. He was only 8 years old, hanging out with us “older” kids, and he didn’t heed the instruction to “run!” when we dropped the Black Cat in the milk bottle.
We also used to build Molotov Cocktails and explode them against concrete along a river in a park. We would surely be arrested today, even though we didn’t destroy anyone’s property. We were sort of weird, too, in that we would go and pick up the broken glass after we had our fun.
Did he earn his merit badge?
Totally with you. You used a hand-loading analogy but jeez, what if you taught a kid to drive and he then went and started doing doughnuts on people’s lawns? I mean what sort of responsible parent would teach their kid to drive? Don’t they know that could only lead to the kid doing something irresponsible and damaging other people’s property? What kind of nuts are these folks? Call Child Services!