A great story - shopping for gunpowder
From Larry Correia's blog
Monster Hunter Nation:
TALES OF THE GUNSTORE! Darwin Awards in the making.
So yesterday we�re working at the gunshop when a couple of gentlemen come into the shop, wanting to buy some blackpowder. I tell them that we don�t sell reloading supplies (yet). I then start telling them where they can get some locally, or the best places to buy it online.
They say that they�re going to need hundreds of pounds of it, and they need it today. I tell them that most places don�t stock that much on hand, and I then asked what they were doing.
Well� it turns out that they just built a cannon. It had a 2″ bore. They told me that they were going to go shoot it today, and that since they needed 1/2 pound of blackpowder, PER SHOT, that it would add up pretty quick.
You know that sound that a record makes when it skips. Yeah, I heard that noise in my brain.
�1/2 pound, per shot?�
�Yeah, that�s what somebody told us.�
�Are you sure you�re not mixing up pounds and ounces? Or maybe some other unit of measurement?�
�Nope. This guy we saw at the range told us that�s what he loads his with.�
Okay, let me break this down for the non-physicists in the audience. That�s enough powder to blow their cannon, and whoever�s setting it off, into smoking fragments of steel and meat. I suggest that their measurement might be mistaken. But nope, that�s what some guy at the range told them, so that�s what they were going to do. Today. As soon as they found some powder.
Played with homemade gunpowder as a kid and the crap I was making was strong enough. A half-pound of commercial black powder would make a sizable crater as well as giving everything in a fifty-foot radius an extremely bad day.
Going to be Googling for
+explosion +Utah tomorrow to see if anything shows up.
Just Wow...
Posted by DaveH at April 8, 2008 10:39 PM