Recently, there have been two instances of people trying to carry a pipe bomb out of the country. One was a kid in Edmonton who forgot it was in a camera bag. The other, a man trying to enter the US with a pipe bomb he made when he was ten years old, and held on to for presumably nostalgic reasons. Both cases make me wonder about teaching people things that should be obvious.
Both of these cases involved someone who was very young who just happened to make an explosive device, and then just carried it around without a care in the world. In one case, that person admitted that his ultimate goal was to blow up a shed, and then take pictures of the explosions, presumably because explosions look cool. The choice to just carry it around in a camera bag until he could find the appropriate shed was perhaps not the best choice he could have made.
The adults in the room naturally know a little bit about the proper care of explosives. Even those of us who don't use them often are aware that trying to carry them across borders is a bad idea, and that one should be careful handling anything that could easily explode and damage all of those body parts we hold so dear. Clearly, this is not a lesson that we are imparting to our younger generation.
The argument that kids should not be making pipe bombs in the first place is a compelling one, and I would agree. The problem is that we have kids who are making them, and then getting caught with them just lying around, like a normal person would forget snacks or hair product in their luggage. It's clear that these kids are not particularly aware of the dangers inherent in explosives, and since nobody is talking to them about it, they're going to continue to make pipe bombs without a thought to the inherent danger.
It should be obvious to most people, that bombs are dangerous, but if people are not aware of the obvious they must be taught about it. In this case, the majority of students in the school would roll their eyes at the idea and laugh about how any idiot should know that they shouldn't make a pipe bomb, the various dangers of popular explosives, and so on. The majority of kids don't really need to be told that an explosive is dangerous, and even those that do are at least aware that keeping them out of their luggage is usually smart.
To put it bluntly, there are people who don't quite understand the obvious. They're not just making bombs, they're driving drunk, they're doing a wide variety of unsafe practices in their every day lives. The bombs are an extreme example, but they're not the only one out there. Sometimes, it makes one wonder how on earth you can actually get through to these people when they clearly haven't caught on to the risk they're taking. Is there a way to teach someone these lessons?
In the case of these two kids, they will likely learn their lesson about carrying around a bomb and cease doing so. But if they thought the bombs were a good idea, what other good ideas have they had that are actually dangerous? Lots of people talk about common sense, but with incidents like these bombs, it's clear that common sense is not a given in all people. We have to figure out how to teach some obvious things, for everyone's safety.
