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I'm not sure if it should be scarier - the deadliest terrorist gas attack in Japan killed less people than the regularly scheduled weekly mass shooting in US us

by glogla 4y ago

I'm not sure if it should be scarier - the deadliest terrorist gas attack in Japan killed less people than the regularly scheduled weekly mass shooting in US usually does.

bigDinosaur 4y ago
Not to minimise shootings, but at least you (or law enforcement) can shoot back, whereas with chemical attacks you cannot. The issue is really that you could scale chemical attacks up immensely and find some truly nasty chemical agents. I'm surprised it hasn't happened more - perhaps due to how dangerous working with extremely toxic chemicals actually is. Either way, wikipedia suggests 1k were injured in the attacks, so it's not just deaths. Imagine a terrorist who attacked with a chemical agent that just made you blind or gave you brain damage, but didn't kill you. Would that not be much scarier than being shot?
- oynqr 4y ago
  Someone did the math, scaling up chemical attacks is really hard because the stuff dissipates so quickly, even if you have something like sarin.
  - bobthepanda 4y ago
    Also, it is really hard to gather the materials needed in the amounts necessary without raising suspicions, which also says a lot about how Japanese police handled the case.
  - bigDinosaur 4y ago
    Any link? Would be curious to read. That is, of course, good to hear.
    - glogla 4y ago
      There's this military historian perspective [1] on why chemical weapons aren't used by regular militaries becase they aren't actually that effective (compared to spending the same effort on making normal explosives). It is slightly different topic to terrorist attacks but I think it touched on that as well. Be warned, the blog is a complete rabbit hole of "oh god why am I reading analysis of logistics of Lord of the Ring armies at 3 AM". [1]: https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-chemical-weapons-anymore/ https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...

by glogla 4y ago

I'm not sure if it should be scarier - the deadliest terrorist gas attack in Japan killed less people than the regularly scheduled weekly mass shooting in US usually does.

bigDinosaur 4y ago

Not to minimise shootings, but at least you (or law enforcement) can shoot back, whereas with chemical attacks you cannot. The issue is really that you could scale chemical attacks up immensely and find some truly nasty chemical agents. I'm surprised it hasn't happened more - perhaps due to how dangerous working with extremely toxic chemicals actually is. Either way, wikipedia suggests 1k were injured in the attacks, so it's not just deaths. Imagine a terrorist who attacked with a chemical agent that just made you blind or gave you brain damage, but didn't kill you. Would that not be much scarier than being shot?

oynqr 4y ago
Someone did the math, scaling up chemical attacks is really hard because the stuff dissipates so quickly, even if you have something like sarin.
- bobthepanda 4y ago
  Also, it is really hard to gather the materials needed in the amounts necessary without raising suspicions, which also says a lot about how Japanese police handled the case.
- bigDinosaur 4y ago
  Any link? Would be curious to read. That is, of course, good to hear.
  - glogla 4y ago
    There's this military historian perspective [1] on why chemical weapons aren't used by regular militaries becase they aren't actually that effective (compared to spending the same effort on making normal explosives). It is slightly different topic to terrorist attacks but I think it touched on that as well. Be warned, the blog is a complete rabbit hole of "oh god why am I reading analysis of logistics of Lord of the Ring armies at 3 AM". [1]: https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-chemical-weapons-anymore/ https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...