A student in North Carolina planned to blow his high school up with ANFO - ammonium nitrate fuel oil, a.ka. a fertilizer bomb. *Caveat: I don't know how to make it, I've never attempted, that's illegal. These crazy little shits - and that's just what they are - are upgrading. It was bound to happen. After seeing Columbine's 15 dead, and Virginia Tech's 32, these fuckers have decided that the body count of those they hate should be higher, and that everyone in the school should suffer, simply because the bastards are jealous/picked on/whatever reason people will use to excuse his actions.
Shit, I'm surprised they haven't done this already.
This kid, Ryan, would have succeeded, but he made the (fortunate) mistake of having the 10 lbs. of fertilizer shipped directly to his house where his mom then discovered it and notified the police.
I could turn this into a diatribe about the moral decay of the youth, or how Ryan is actually the victim, or how we need more laws restricting who can buy fertilizer, but I won't, because it's all bullshit.
Have you ever heard of the Law of Large Numbers? With a big enough given sample, all possibilities will show up at least once, basically. What does this mean? I'll let John Ross explain this to you.
Author and fellow gun-nut Mr. Ross, on the Law of Large Numbers:
http://web.archive.org/web/20060513130605/www.john-ross.net/lawlarge.htm
"How many students are there at any given moment in this country, fifty million? Aren't teenagers often depressed and disaffected? Does it strike you as astonishing that one out of every ten million of them might be not only depressed and disaffected, but also a murderous little shit?"
One in ten million gives us a school shooting every ten weeks, and we don't have anywhere near that many, even though they put the evil little bastards on the cover of Newsweek. Given fifty million students, and incessant media coverage, I think we're lucky not to have one every week.
We're especially lucky they've so far used guns, but that may change. What if the next homicidal teenaged misfit dissolves Styrofoam in gasoline (homemade napalm), carries it in five gallon buckets to his school ("It's for chemistry class, Miss Johnson"), pours it in the hallways ("Whoops!"), uses bike locks on the exit doors, and strikes a match?
...
The law of large numbers tells us that with a big enough sample, unlikely things will start to happen, and they'll happen in direct proportion to the size of the sample. If a new drug is used to treat a quarter of a million people and one person has an allergic reaction and dies, is that acceptable? Most people I ask say "Of course." Yet if the same drug becomes so helpful that now fifty million people use it, and 200 have an allergic reaction and die, the media will scream that it's unsafe. No, it's the same as it was. Do the math.
When you do the math, life looks a lot better."
No comments:
Post a Comment