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"Police confer Sunday around a white Acura, believed to be connected to the man who wasarrested, on 11th street in Santa Monica." (caption and photo courtesy Los Angeles Times)

“Authorities in Santa Monica found possible explosives as well as assault rifles and ammunition Sunday in the car of a man who told them he was in town for the L.A. Pride festival in West Hollywood,” latimes.com reports. “Early Sunday,  Santa Monica police received a call of a suspected prowler near Olympic Boulevard and 11th Street. Patrol officers responded and encountered an individual who told officers he was waiting for a friend. That led officers to inspect the car and find several weapons and a lot of ammunition as well as tannerite, an ingredient that could be used to create a pipe bomb.”

The Festival will continue. Los Angeles Eric Garcetti says the incident is “completely unrelated” to what happened in Orlando.

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40 COMMENTS

  1. The Festival will continue. Los Angeles Eric Garcetti says the incident is “completely unrelated” to what happened in Orlando.
    I am skeptical. We will see.

    • Whats the parade route? Seems like an odd corner to be caught ‘prowling’. Mainly an industrial area. Was he possibly SWATed by someone?

    • I wouldn’t expect anything less in California. If you sneezed while signing a speeding ticket in CA, they might search your vehicle too.

      • Unless you’re an illegal alien, then they don’t bother just wave you on since they’ll get in trouble for arresting you and know that if they issue a ticket it won’t get paid anyway…

    • If there was something questionable visible in the backseat, it could give the cop probable cause for a search.

  2. How long is the festival taking place? Considering that the tannerite wasn’t in bomb form yet and he obviously didn’t have the weapons out and ready, he was foolishly conducting his surveillance without leaving the contraband at home.
    FBI must be cataloguing other LGBT events taking place around the country this week. Might be wise to avoid them for the time being, or at least increase vigilance.

  3. “waiting for a friend” is probable cause??? Must have been suspicious looking or something. Not muslim, I’m sure, that would be racial profiling. He is probably an OFWG.

    • According to the linked story, the guy was knocking on multiple people’s doors and loitering in the area, which prompted the call to the police. Apparently he had all four car doors open when the cops showed up, so seeing something warranting a search probably wasn’t too tough.

    • I was wondering about that too, I thought tannerite only detonated when struck by something traveling at high speed.

        • No, it takes an intense impact. You have to shoot it, and with a real gun. I think there might be stuff that will go off with .22LR, but most of it won’t. The stuff I’ve used takes higher velocity ammo than that. You can shoot it all day with a .22, and all you’ll do is punch holes in the container that will let the tannerite leak out. The stuff I had wouldn’t go off with any of the handguns we had that day either, and they ran the field of common calibers.

        • Two possible answers are that he had either stolen commercial blasting caps or constructed improvised caps and they don’t want to put that in the news until they can figure out the source, or that he didn’t realize it won’t explode inside a pipe without a cap, and they don’t want to give tips to the next would-be bomber.

    • Tannerite is the brand name of a binary explosive marketed primarily for making exploding targets for firearms practice. It is a patented combination of ammonium nitrate (an oxidizer) and aluminum powder (a fuel) that is supplied as two separate powders that are mixed and shaken to produce an explosive.

      • We know, but what we don’t know is how someone could make a pipe bomb out of Tannerite. A burning fuse won’t set it off, and neither will electricity.

        • I would imagine that you could buy some ammo, and use it as a detonator. If you place a round in a pipe (like in those zip guns), and make a simple mechanical contraption that would delay-strike the primer, the whole thing would go off.

        • int19h, I doubt it.

          It takes some serious motivation in the form of a kinetic impact to get a detonation from that stuff.

          It *might* be possible to increase the sensitivity of the Tannerite chemically, however.

          Perhaps season it with nitro-methane?

        • The short answer is you can’t. It simply is not sufficient as a secondary explosive. Besides, there are far, far better options for primary (detonators) and secondary (main boom) explosives out there that do not require a heavy mechanical shock to initiate an explosion (and a weak one at that with RE of around 0.6).

    • Hard to say … he could have been a Catholic, Baptist, Methodist, Christian Reformed, Presbyterian, or Non-Denominational terrorist as well. Best to look at his social media accounts and see who his “friends” are.

      • Maybe check his friend’s friend’s friend’s friend’s friend’s……..better chance of finding something that way

    • Ironically the identity of arrested man is the most important detail and it is missing from the story. For all we know this was a gay security guard picking up his boyfriend to attend the parade after which they planned to have an enjoyable afternoon at the shooting range. The article doesn’t even say what the charges are. I suppose in California it’s certain that some weapon law was broken…

      • I didn’t realize you could bring explosives to a gun range. Your mockery of this guy being arrested makes you not only sound stupid, but insensitive to the fact the country just lost 49 innocent lives in the country’s worst mass shooting in modern history.

        • Easy there, there are ranges where you can use exploding targets. That is exactly what Tannerite is.
          If that cop stopped me on my way to my friend’s property last Friday, he would find the same things in my car. Nowhere near any gay parade though.

  4. If the search was legal, the guy is going away for firearms violations even if had no evil intentions for the gay pride parade.

  5. What a dilemma for Dear Leader, whether to come to the defense of his most favorite oppressed victim group, or his next favorite. Playing favorites is hard.

  6. The dreaded ass-salt rifle. If anything can be taken away from this news, it’s that good police work, and procedure saved countless lives and that the cops who responded to this call did fantastic work, if only our big box media relayed that message with the same tenor and duration as they do for the next police brutality piece.

    Love them for their success and vilify them for their mistakes, from what I have seen it is not easy being a cop, but credit where credit is due, would go a long way in healing some of the wounds between the police and the people.

    Just want to say to the cops who frequent this site and especially the officers who thwarted this terror attack, thank you for being you!

  7. Stop parroting the mainstream press by tossing out the term assault rifle. It is their code word for big, scary gun. It is most likely a military-style semi-automatic rifle. An assault rifle technically would be a machine gun, which has not been able to be sold legally since the 1930s.

      • Kelly, a legal pre-1985 (ish) machinegun (select-fire) like an M-16 will cost about $20,000 *pus* the $200 transfer stamp…

    • wtf ever. It was a gun similar to the one just used in the Orlando shooting and you can obviously kill a large number of people with either gun. Quit splitting hairs.

      • Pssst…your ignorance is showing! You can kill large number of people with any gun. Or without a gun. Especially if all those people are unarmed.

  8. How coincidental! A guy in Florida and a guy in California seeking to attack, en mass, gays in both places. Why you’d almost think they were working together.

  9. Jeff and JWM, Thanks for clarifying. The limited availability and the significant cost of machine guns led me to believe they were unavailable for everyone. It is only for most people.

  10. The narrative I heard today was that he was bisexual and looking to hang out at the pride parade. Seems the intent wasn’t there. Whether or not that is true or not I cant be certain but if it is, it looks like a case of a guy getting caught up in California gun laws.

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