On Thu, 2 Mar 2000, Bernie Lee wrote:
> I work for a news station in Louisiana. My angle on a current story is how
> easy it would be for a young person to find bomb making instructions on the
> internet. How easy is for our young people?
Almost exactly as easy as it is for same young people to find bomb
making instructions in a book at their local library. In fact, searching
through the Louisiana State Library system card catalog, under the Subject
heading of 'Explosives', I find 13 entries, any one of which looks to be a
likely candidate for having chemical recipes for explosive compounds. But
I'm going to guess that you'll be unwilling to write a story advocating
the censoring of Libraries, seeing as how when it comes down to censoring
words on actual paper, reporters seem to get all defensive about First
amendment rights.
Or maybe I'm wrong about your angle on this question, but it has
been my experience here on the net that when people bring up chiiiildren
and bomb recipes, their intention is to create a flurry of panicked
activity and publicity for their publication / show, etc. You might
instead run a story about parents teaching their children right from
wrong.
Seeing as how a significant fraction of these books I mention were
written prior to 1980, this implies that the information has been around
and available to children far longer than children have had easy access to
the internet, and these 'children and explosives' incidents have been a
rather recent thing, it seems like a good hypothesis that children having
access to the information is not the problem.
-gore
