Rifles: Threat To The Nation’s Energy Grid?
BY Herschel Smith
12 years ago
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. I leave for a few minutes and this is what I come back to?
Let’s recall that in A Terrorist Attack That America Cannot Absorb, I described in some detail an attack on the main step-up transformers of the fossil fuel power plants in the nation as being perhaps the most serious threat to the economy and infrastructure that this country faced. I also linked two papers on Hezbollah fighters already being in America. I described an attack in which fighters destroyed the transformers completely and thoroughly enough that they could not function. For this article I relied on a colleague at work who knows far more than I do about the subject.
David Codrea discusses the Obama administration’s reaction to this same type of threat.
Rifles, even .22 caliber models many young people receive as their first gun, are “among the greatest threats to the reliability of the nation’s power system,” U.S. Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Jon Wellinghoff claimed at a Tuesday Bloomberg Government Breakfast, Bloomberg News reported yesterday.
Citing “inadequately protected” transformers as easy targets, Wellinghoff told the group that terrorists in “coordinated” actions committed to destroying them “could get 200 yards away with a .22 rifle and take the whole thing out.”
A .22 rifle. When I learned to shoot a .22 rifle, I did my target practicing in my back yard (we lived in the country) using our aluminum trash can lid as a target. The .22 round would penetrate that lid, but not much more. My dad would come home from work, inspect my targeting, and let me continue.
Has Wellinghoff ever shot a .22? Rather than focusing on Hezbollah they are focusing on backyard shooting with a .22. Rather than working to shore up the nation’s energy grid and its vulnerabilities, they have put their attention on 200 yard shots taking “the whole thing out!” Nothing about Hezbollah, nothing about securing the border, nothing about additional security infrastructure around these components, but hand-wringing over .22 rifles.
This is unserious. It isn’t adult-like analysis. It’s juvenile and childish. As soon as I turn my back, this is the kind of twaddle that the Obama administration comes out with. See, this is why we can’t have nice things. Everything gets broken.
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