Before the "Paris in the news again" thread got locked, a point was raised that the French police will hunt down the suppliers of the weapons used. There appear to have been two main classes of weapons... explosives (suicide belts) and AK-47s. How difficult would these be to procure?
According to CNN, the explosives used was TATP. Acetone peroxide (triacetone triperoxide) is a common explosive for suicide bombers (including the London bombings of 2005, and in the same year the failed bombing of the football stadium in Norman, Oklahoma) because it can be manufactured from relatively easily available precursor chemicals, namely hydrogen peroxide, acetone and hydrochloric acid. All of these chemicals are incredibly easy to come by in substantial quantities, and are quite safe (apart from acetones flammability) by themselves. I don't know about Europe, but all of these could be acquired at Wal Mart.
Converting the precursor chemicals into the explosive TATP requires, apparently, very little actual effort. The process can be described in a paragraph. A google search found a whole bunch of "how-to" pages and videos.
As for AK-47's: these things are *incredibly* common (something like 75 million + of them). It's not just that the Soviet Union flooded the third world with the things, but they are being mass produced now in rudimentary machine shops around the world. For example, the "Khyber Pass Copy," weapons hand-made in the Khyber Pass region between Pakistan and Afganistan, is so commonly encountered it has become a cliche. Other hand-made AK-47's are so readily available in some regions that they can be had for $6 or a sack of rice.
Hand made counterfeits of the AK-47 run the gamut from dangerously shoddy to very high quality, but for the purposes of terrorist activity such as Paris, so long as it fires and doesn't explode, it's good enough. The barrels need not even be rifled! When the targets are only a few feet away, rifling doesn't buy you much, but deleting rifling makes the gun a lot easier and cheaper to make. The point here is that if these weapons can be manufactured in a third world village without benefit of modern machine tools, they can certainly be stamped out in some hidden basement outside Paris or Berlin or London. And that's if, for some reason, the terrorists in question don't simply procure a boxload of the guns from smugglers. With Europes now-open borders and freedom of movement, and with a whole lot of folks being rapidly swept from place to place, smuggling something as simple as an AK-47 would be a snap. I would expect that the AK-47's used in France were simply smuggled in. Since the AK-47 is just a series of steel parts, chemical detectors (including dogs) won't pick them up. Many of the components can be easily hidden in plain sight.
Compare the easy availability of terrorist weapons to the weapons used to counter them... drones and missiles and NSA computer systems.
Note: None of this should be construed as political, just simple chemistry and mechanics.
According to CNN, the explosives used was TATP. Acetone peroxide (triacetone triperoxide) is a common explosive for suicide bombers (including the London bombings of 2005, and in the same year the failed bombing of the football stadium in Norman, Oklahoma) because it can be manufactured from relatively easily available precursor chemicals, namely hydrogen peroxide, acetone and hydrochloric acid. All of these chemicals are incredibly easy to come by in substantial quantities, and are quite safe (apart from acetones flammability) by themselves. I don't know about Europe, but all of these could be acquired at Wal Mart.
Converting the precursor chemicals into the explosive TATP requires, apparently, very little actual effort. The process can be described in a paragraph. A google search found a whole bunch of "how-to" pages and videos.
As for AK-47's: these things are *incredibly* common (something like 75 million + of them). It's not just that the Soviet Union flooded the third world with the things, but they are being mass produced now in rudimentary machine shops around the world. For example, the "Khyber Pass Copy," weapons hand-made in the Khyber Pass region between Pakistan and Afganistan, is so commonly encountered it has become a cliche. Other hand-made AK-47's are so readily available in some regions that they can be had for $6 or a sack of rice.
Hand made counterfeits of the AK-47 run the gamut from dangerously shoddy to very high quality, but for the purposes of terrorist activity such as Paris, so long as it fires and doesn't explode, it's good enough. The barrels need not even be rifled! When the targets are only a few feet away, rifling doesn't buy you much, but deleting rifling makes the gun a lot easier and cheaper to make. The point here is that if these weapons can be manufactured in a third world village without benefit of modern machine tools, they can certainly be stamped out in some hidden basement outside Paris or Berlin or London. And that's if, for some reason, the terrorists in question don't simply procure a boxload of the guns from smugglers. With Europes now-open borders and freedom of movement, and with a whole lot of folks being rapidly swept from place to place, smuggling something as simple as an AK-47 would be a snap. I would expect that the AK-47's used in France were simply smuggled in. Since the AK-47 is just a series of steel parts, chemical detectors (including dogs) won't pick them up. Many of the components can be easily hidden in plain sight.
Compare the easy availability of terrorist weapons to the weapons used to counter them... drones and missiles and NSA computer systems.
Note: None of this should be construed as political, just simple chemistry and mechanics.
