Gene, not trying to stir up any more crap here but I am sincerely curious. I don't know a whole bunch about explosives so if you don't mind would you explain the reasoning behind shooting a suspicious abandoned attach� case with a rifle, and then again with a shotgun.
Suspected it might be triggered by a motion sensing device? What if it actually did explode and contained dangerous biological/chemical agents?
web page Well, it didn't. And shooting it wouldn't release any kind of chemical components, although it would have blown it up had there been explosives in it. It being a breifcase, it couldn't have contained enough explosives to really do any damage at the range at which we were shooting at it. It had already been moved by employees of the store, and therefore was relaitively safe from motion-activated devices. And the weight just wasn't there to indicate a thermo-nuclear device.
Actually, I have attended chemical and explosive device schools. And the biefcase I shot (and shot pretty damn well) contained only routine letters and documents from a real estate agent.
Of course, we could have called in the CDC or FBI bomb squad or the EOD or whoever dealt with that stuff at that time and corodoned off the area, and they would have established a zone and closed down the road and traffic for three days while they shot the hinges off the briefcase.
To put it in context, ghis was after the anthrax scare in Washington and we were getting calls from people who found that white stuff they coat envelopes with in their mail. It will leave minute specks if you look for them...it's a white clay=like substance that some people eat, actually. Pregnant women especially.
Figured we needed to display a little reality. I think four people died (maybe less) in the enitre United States, and it caused panic all over the US. Reprehensible.
But the Sheriff chose not to call in the Feds. It was a wise decision. BTW, weapons-grade anthrax (which was in the news then) is destroyed by an explosive. The heat kills it.
We were wll back and covered. No worry....I've blown up lots of stuff in the military.
Kinda fun.
