How The NRA Impeded The Boston Bomber Investigation

This is a terrible article. Yes, the NRA was opposed to extra ill-thought-out mandates on the gunpowder used in ammunition, laws which might make bullets less reliable and would make criminals out of people who make their own ammo. The article writer concedes that it might have been a boneheaded idea, but assumes we could magically fix it by throwing more money and laws at it, like so:

> And if “good science” says existing taggants fall short, then Congress can fund research to develop taggants that work without degrading the quality of the explosive charge in bullets.

So if we had taggants that were proven to work well in this context - which we don't - and if there were a reliable federal registry of where everybody bought their ammunition and ammo and gunpowder and if the bombers had used that exact type of gunpowder...we still wouldn't have found them any faster than we did. But in some purely hypothetical alternate universe where we didn't find them right away and taggants were known to work well in gunpowder intended for bullets and all privacy concerns had been dealt with so the NRA had no reason to oppose it yet did so anyway out of sheer pigheadedness...in that universe, one could perhaps claim the NRA impeded the investigation.

In THIS universe, not so much.

So in other words, not at all, but guns are scary so we're going to blame the NRA for privacy rights.

What BS - Gunpowder is not the only way to make a bomb (see TX fertilizer plant explosion).

I bet everyone in Boston wished they had a gun the day the terrorism suspect was on the loose in their neighborhoods.

Please…