Living in a very violent country, I am concerned with the issue of concealed weapons. Conventional metal detectors are not very useful when searching a car for weapons, for example. If bullet casings contained a small amount of radioactive material, then police and other law enforcement officials could use a detector to more accurately find concealed weapons. (this could be extended to the weapons themselves)-- senatorjam, May 01 2004 (?) Radioactive Spoons http://www.progressive.org/cusac9810.htm [Worldgineer, Oct 04 2004, last modified Oct 05 2004] It's easy enough to make bullets, so the purpose of this would immediately be defeated by the black market.-- DrCurry, May 01 2004 The Rail gun in Eraser, and the gun in The Jackel (the Bruce Willis/Richard Gere version) fired depleted Uranium rounds (i think cos it's light).-- MikeOliver, May 01 2004 On the contrary it is very dense (1.7 times that of lead) and hard, to increase penetration.-- FarmerJohn, May 01 2004 Ahh, well it still sounds good!-- MikeOliver, May 01 2004 The US Military uses depleted uranium in the large tank piercing bullets fired from the A-10 Warthog.-- zigness, May 01 2004 People just need to develop a more sensitive system of cordite or gunpowder detection. Dogs can do it - we need a machine that can, too!-- Macwarrior, May 01 2004 [Macwarrior], it's been done. The bomb sniffing machines at airports do this now.-- zigness, May 02 2004 If you put enought radioactive material in the weapons, it will surely cut down on the number of people willing to carry one around with them all the time. Especially those people who tend to keep them tucked into their pants, right near their privates...-- luecke, May 02 2004 My + vote is for making guns a bit radioactive. Not enough to hurt anyone very much, but enough to detect. Sadly though, other items may set off detectors as well (see link).
(off topic) Thanks [sj] for reminding me of this issue - several years ago there were big debates about how much radioactive metal should be allowed to be recycled into everyday products. I don't know what ever happened to the legislation. Since then I've acquired a geiger counter ($35 on ebay) to see how radioactive the world around me is (yes, that's my idea of fun). I think I'll set up some experiments (if ever I find time) to measure how radioactive metal items in my house are.-- Worldgineer, May 03 2004 No need for radioactivity, just make a law that the barrel has to be two inches in diameter and weight at least ten pounds.-- ldischler, May 03 2004 Thanks Bliss, Living in Jamaica now, exciting time and place-- senatorjam, May 06 2004 baked. Kriptonite bullets.-- NeoPiter, Jul 21 2004 Since the okc bombing radio-reactive tracers have been but in variouse oxidizers sold in the US in order to be able to track where they were sold. This could be added to gun-powder/gun-cotton (smokeless powder) so that it could be easly picked up by an x-ray machine set to dectect reactive tracers in the powder....-- dlapham, Jul 21 2004 Needed to drag this up for discussion purposes. It should be fairly ease to make shell casings radioactive.-- senatorjam, Jun 29 2007 Extend this slightly by making all weapons and munitions highly radioactive, ideally to the point where the act of loading a gun would achieve critical mass.-- nuclear hobo, Jun 29 2007 Yeah, we don't need any more violent people having kids.-- quantum_flux, Jun 30 2007 Sigh. Another assumption that weapons ownership means that you're violent. I've never had occasion to draw or display in more than 30 years of responsible ownership and carrying.
And you want to introduce radioactive elements into my life?-- normzone, Jun 30 2007 Then why do you own the gun? It doesn't necessary make you violent, but it does mean if you ever are mugged or whatever, the chance skyrockets that someone will get sriously hurt.-- Germanicus, Jun 30 2007 //The bomb sniffing machines at airports do this now.//
I can't get the image of a mechanical nose sniffing a bags now. Tehehe.-- Germanicus, Jun 30 2007 //It doesn't necessary make you violent, but it does mean if you ever are mugged or whatever, the chance skyrockets that someone will get sriously hurt.//
Statistics show that you are far more likely to be shot by a person you know than by a stranger.
Unless of course you are in the military, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Palestine, etc.-- nuclear hobo, Jun 30 2007 random, halfbakery