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Fire the beam weapons! A man has been sentenced to 30 years in prison over his dream of a novel "weapon of mass destruction":
A 52-year-old industrial mechanic who was the first person in the U.S. convicted of trying to produce a weapon of mass destruction under a 2004 law intended to stop terrorists from using radiation-dispersing "dirty bombs" was sentenced Monday to 30 years in prison followed by a lifetime of supervised release.
Glendon Scott Crawford, of Galway in upstate New York, planned to kill Muslims because of their religion as well as other people whose political and social beliefs he disagreed with, U.S. Attorney Richard Hartunian said. "This is a classic case of domestic terrorism," Hartunian said after Crawford's sentencing by U.S. District Judge Gary L. Sharpe.
Investigators began tracking Crawford in 2012 after he approached two local Jewish groups with his idea for how they could defeat their enemies using a mobile X-ray weapon. Prosecutors said Crawford also sought support for the device in 2013 from a Ku Klux Klan grand wizard in North Carolina who was an FBI informant.
Also at NBC New York. Here's a story about Glendon Crawford and his friend Eric Feight being charged back in 2013.
The moral of this story? Trust no one and do it yourself.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by jmorris on Thursday January 19 2017, @01:12AM
Ok, I can see getting this moron off the street before he manages to come up with a more practical way to kill people. But WMD? Not seeing it. At any power levels some random asshole is likely to generate you would be beaming X-Rays into your victim for hours and hope he dies in weeks to months. Devious way to kill someone it might be, mass destruction it ain't. Seems to me like you could kill a lot more masses with an off the shelf rifle and with a lot less expense and effort. (And of course you would kill twice as many if it is black and has a folding stock because... ASSAULT RIFLE!!! And if it has a lug for a bayonet too, I wouldn't want to even contemplate the body count one could achieve.)