Why, he was just going for his Bomb Making Boy Scout Merit Badge.
>>rescue workers could find only one of the fingertips.
Ah, "Fingertips (Pt 1)". Stevie Wonder.
>>"First, he was screaming for five minutes," said his brother, Michael, 17, "He said, 'I can't believe I blew off my fingers.'"
Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow! Ow!
Gee, you make a bomb, it goes off, and it blows off your fingertips. What a surprise.
>>Police had been called to the same part of town, just steps from the Lynn line, on Saturday for a report of a loud explosion..."Investigators are determining if the same person was responsible for each explosion"
I'm guessing it is.
>>Police treated the home as a crime scene
Improvised explosive device--does al Queda have a cell in Swampscott, MA?
>>This isn't the first time local police have dealt with the premature explosion of homemade bombs made by teenagers.
Yes, yes, it's a common occurance I guess! Just a typical teenage activity.
Am I being insensitive when I say that everyone making homemade bombs should have his fingers blown off or worse?
This is pretty tame stuff- I'm guessing that the "fingertips" that he lost were just chunks of skin. A painful lesson about the dangers of using "contact" explosives but he'll recover. At least he was smart enough to use cardboard- a lot of kids use steel or copper pipes.
Typical teenage kid. Hopefully he won’t be maimed for life — not by the homemade fireworks, he’ll live with that, but by being charged with some crime and given a criminal record and possibly being sent to juvenile hall — for being a kid.
“You mess with the bull, you get the horns. I used to have a clever hand signal that goes with that expression, but ... ah ... I don’t use it anymore ... because ... well, I just don’t use it.”
Stick to Tannerite, kids. Legal and much safer.
I did much more than that both as a kid and a teenager...
I count myself thankful that I didn’t injure myself seriously.
Kids do stupid and risky things. Some don’t make it through intact or at all. They are just being kids, and some are unlucky.
I wonder if the “caps” were the rolls of paper caps from a cap gun? Back in the 60’s when I was a kid we used to take a needle and stick it through the center of the little “dots” on a roll of caps. You stick it through one and then fold the strip like an accordian, sticking the needle through each cap successively. When you’ve done the entire roll you pull the needle out and what you have is a roll of caps where every single dot is touching each other and the gunpowder is mixed between them because of the needle-hole.
Then you find a way to bind it, such as with tape or something. Stick in a fuse and have fun. Did I mention we loved to blow stuff up when we were kids?
Why did you demean the boy scouts? are you Queer?
As a youngster I used a rock tumbler to wet-mix the ingredients for black powder. I even made my own charcoal from seasoned oak - now I know that willow would be better. The powder I made would make Goex proud. BTW, I used LONG fuses.
I remember the scene in the movie, The Kingdom, when they met the former Saudi bombmaker whose working in an internet cafe. Jamie Foxx goes to shake his hand, and notices some fingers missing. The bombmaker says something about his profession like, “Eventually we all swallow some of our own poison.”
I had a teenage friend who dropped rocks onto shotgun shells from the roof of his garage. Another guy used to climb telephone poles on a dare. Believe it or not, they both grew up to be screwballs.
My niece is 13 and lives in Swampscott. I’ll bet she knows this kid. It’s not a big town.
If he is related to any of the Surettes that I know from that area, this is just normal teenage behavior.