Best way to kill a ton of people?

[Martinus]

Easy. Cause the Earth to collide with the sun. 

[Viking]

Create a fake Tamiflu tampering scandal during flu season.

Though, Utøya seems to be a good example. Find a place with one or no escape routs and start shooting.

[dps]

How about messing with train tracks to cause a derailment?
Works for partisans. Never heard of terrorists/general purpose psychos trying it though.

Partisans generally do that sort of thing to interrupt the shipping of military cargo on the rail line, not to kill the people on the train.

[mongers]

Every time I drive on a crowded interstate I think about the havoc one could cause with a sudden turn of the steering wheel.

Those aren't good thoughts to have.

Yeah, he should listen to you.

[alfred russel]

Hospitals still do the mass casualty event stuff all the time;  hell, I remember the one mass casualty exercise I was involved in way back in '94:  what would happen if a commercial plane in the ATC pattern to BWI crashes into Camden Yards on game night?  ITS GONNA NEED A SHITLOAD OF SCREEN DOORS

Was Peter Angelos at that exercise? "Don't worry guys, I'll mitigate the risk of mass casualties by making the Orioles suck the for the next 15 years."

[alfred russel]

Every time I drive on a crowded interstate I think about the havoc one could cause with a sudden turn of the steering wheel.

A corollary to this is how much havoc could be created with minimal effort from terrorists. Imagine if every so often landmines were left on the roads of major cities at rush hour. That probably wouldn't kill many people, but people would be terrified to go to work, and there would be a large number of future road shutdowns with false alarms.

[Alcibiades]

Yeah I thought about that often when I was deployed back in the day.  Even just a handful of IED's on the side of the road here would cause insane amounts of panic 

And they're not hard to make, either.  I'm honestly surprised it hasn't been done.


But then again, there's a reason that the NSA scans and catelogues the internets, and why this forum is now being flagged for this thread.   

[Grallon]

A few well placed explosives in several rooms of a large movie metroplex - timed to detonate at once after  the screen goes black during blockbuster season.

There's no security checks at all on bags, purses, backpacks, sport bags...

What the blasts doesn't kill the trampling of a panicked herd would.

Even more effective would be several theaters hit at once but you limited your scenario to a one person event.




G.

[Iormlund]

And they're not hard to make, either.  I'm honestly surprised it hasn't been done.

Most terrorists seem to be quite unimaginative and stupid.

Not that surprising when most people are unimaginative and stupid.

[Razgovory]

Yeah I thought about that often when I was deployed back in the day.  Even just a handful of IED's on the side of the road here would cause insane amounts of panic 

And they're not hard to make, either.  I'm honestly surprised it hasn't been done.


But then again, there's a reason that the NSA scans and catelogues the internets, and why this forum is now being flagged for this thread.   

Probably because the people who want to do this are crazy teenagers, not people who have been trained in the military.  Take the Columbine thing.  They made a ton of bombs.  None of them went off cause the people who made them were dumbstruck teenagers who got instructions of the net.  I suppose what I'm saying is that the competency to build a bomb and the desire to do so don't normally occur in the same person.  Occasionally they do, like the UnaBomber, but that's fairly rare.

[Ideologue]

How about releasing CO2 into a quasi enclosed area? Co2 isn't regulated but it kills at high concentrations, like that Nigerian village that got wiped off the face of the planet by a carbon.bubble emerging from a lake.

[mongers]

How about releasing CO2 into a quasi enclosed area? Co2 isn't regulated but it kills at high concentrations, like that Nigerian village that got wiped off the face of the planet by a carbon.bubble emerging from a lake.

Like, say the Earth's atmosphere ?   

[Ed Anger]

I think I saw that in the Prisoner.

[Iormlund]

How much CO2 would you need though? The logistics might suck.

A similar approach would be using chlorine or similar shit. Even a moron can get and mix bleach and ammonia. Or burn certain materials within the A/C vents (that's how a bunch of people died here 20 or so years ago in a pub - owner bypassed electricity current limiters and wire insulators running through the vents caught fire).

[Ideologue]

How about releasing CO2 into a quasi enclosed area? Co2 isn't regulated but it kills at high concentrations, like that Nigerian village that got wiped off the face of the planet by a carbon.bubble emerging from a lake.

Like, say the Earth's atmosphere ?

There were periods in the distant past where Earth's atmosphere would have been immediately toxic, and relatively (geologically) recent periods where the CO2 concentration might have led to adverse health effects, e.g. the late Permian--2000ppm or 2%.  2%, it has been suggested, is not harmful in medium-term situations (like a tour of duty on a submarine), but that's apparently controversial and has not been adequately tested.

On the other hand, I think you need an immediate 7-10% to actually kill people instantly--more through oxygen displacement than toxicity--and that'd be difficult to do with even moderate ventilation.  Scrap it.

Also, I guess this is against the rules anyway, as CO2--even if not very effective--would count as the "C" in NBC weapons.