-Caveat Lector- Internet Provides Bomb Blueprints By JOHN HENDREN .c The Associated Press LITTLETON, Colo. (AP) -- Two things may have made it easy for the Columbine High School gunmen to arm themselves for their bloodbath: gun shows and the Internet. The ingredients used in the explosives were especially easy to find: nails, BBs, duct tape, metal pipe, broken glass and gunpowder. Authorities in Littleton are investigating whether an 18-year-old girlfriend of Dylan Klebold bought two of the weapons in their arsenal at a gun show. They are also exploring whether Eric Harris downloaded bomb-making information from the Internet. Anyone with an afternoon to spare and access to a hardware store and fireworks can make the kind of bombs assembled by the students in Littleton. And with 250 million guns in American homes -- more than the number of cars -- a gun is as accessible to high school students as a weekend ride, according to gun researchers and bomb technicians. Four days after the Littleton massacre, police who searched the home of three Texas teens accused of plotting a strikingly similar attack at their junior high school in Wimberly found gunpowder, homemade bombs and bomb-making instructions downloaded from the Internet. ``If they're talented on the Net, they could probably find the information in an hour or two and take a trip down to the local hardware store,'' said Eric Stalnaker, a captain with the Metro Arson Strike Team in San Diego, which finds about 30 homemade pipe bombs a year. ``And if they're cutting open fireworks and taking out the powder -- which is a dangerous thing to be doing -- probably in one or two days they can have a couple of pipe bombs.'' Harris is reported to have described stripping gunpowder from firecrackers on a Web page that has since been removed. (One of Harris' friends has said the teen-ager worked at a fireworks stand and always made sure he was paid in fireworks.) One explosive, which never went off, was made from a 20-pound propane tank and an egg timer. Nails and BBs were packed in the pipes to maximize the shrapnel that would tear into victims with each blast. The Littleton killers were hardly pioneers. Pipe bombs have been around for decades. When a Baltimore boy made a package bomb that blew the arms off a neighbor who had accused him of vandalism in 1995, he had simply followed the instructions in ``The Anarchist Cookbook,'' according to juvenile court files made available by a Baltimore judge on the condition that the boy's name not be used. The $25 book, first published in 1971, is available at stores like The Tattered Cover in downtown Denver and quoted in dozens of Internet sites. The enthusiastic 160-page how-to guide includes a chapter on bomb-making that notes, ``The formulas and recipes in here are real, they can be made by almost anyone and they can be performed in the kitchen.'' Most students could find the guns used in Littleton in a day or two, said Alan Lizotte, a professor at the State University of New York at Albany who has tracked the gun habits of more than 1,000 Rochester, N.Y.-area youths for 13 years. Once, on a bet, a fellow researcher went to Boston Common to see how long it would take to find a black-market assault weapons. ``It took him about an hour to find someone who wanted to know how many M-16 automatics he wanted,'' Lizotte said. Thousands have found them. More than 6,000 American students were kicked out of school for toting weapons in the 1996-97 academic year, according to the Education Department. Because no paperwork is required in a private gun sale, a buyer can find a private seller at a gun show and exchange cash for a weapon without informing anyone. That includes sales of the TEC DC-9 the boys used. The gun was made illegal for manufacture in the 1994 federal assault weapons ban but can still be legally sold. On Monday, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., a lead sponsor of the assault weapons ban, cited several Web sites where buyers can make similar private sales without the waiting period and background check required in a sale by a licensed dealer. ``The World Wide Web has now become an international, electronic gun show,'' Schumer said. ``These are two glaring loopholes that allow criminals and kids to get guns. The future of the black market in guns is the Internet.'' On April 19, 1995, the day of the Oklahoma City bombing, Simon Wiesenthal Center found only one Web site it considered a ``hate'' site. Today it catalogs 1,500. ``The battlefield on hate has forever shifted in America,'' said the center's associate dean, Rabbi Abraham Cooper. ``Everything now is on the Internet. DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! 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