No, I'm saying that the presence or absence of explosive material is not the yard stick to determine whether something is a hoax bomb or not.
Then what is the yardstick if it isn't the appearance of explosive potential? I think you're blowing smoke.
I can't imagine any other yardstick. So please enlighten me.
The yardstick is what average person might conclude the device is,
If Oxford asked you to write the dictionary definition of a hoax bomb, you would write, "A hoax bomb is anything that an average person concludes is a hoax bomb."
The average person might think the world is flat without a decent education. Is that really how YOU classify things? Do you keep "average people" around to help you tell the difference between cat piss and your morning coffee?
and the timer is just as much a component of it as are the explosives.
A timer without explosives is Just a timer. Timers are unnecessary. Only the explosive material is necessary for a bomb or the appearance of explosive material for a hoax bomb. Movie hero spies love blowing things like cars using RPGs and sometimes just high caliber bullets. All that you need for a bomb hoax may be a pile of gasoline canisters on a roof.
As an example, Steve Wozniak tweeted a similar incident from his youth: He pranked one of his teachers with metronome that made a ticking sound. The teacher thought it was a bomb based solely on the sound. If simple ticking sound is enough to fool someone, then surely looking like a bomb timer that remotely resembles a suitcase bomb from a movie might do so as well.
Ticking is a potential indication of a bomb IF it is hidden and the the existence of explosive material cannot be determined. That's not the case here at all. Just as it wouldn't be if Wozniak had set the metronome out on the table by itself. At least a dozen people saw the clock on the day of Ahmed's arrest and NONE of them thought it looked explosive. NONE of them thought it was a bomb.
That the pencils could be made of explosive material and therefore it's a hoax bomb is silly...
How silly is it? Take away the pencils from your picture. Does it still look like a bomb to you? Or does it merely look like a clock with wires?
And take away Ahmed's clock from the pencil case, and it no longer would look like a suitcase bomb.
I'll take that as an agreement that the picture of the pencil bomb would not look like a bomb without the pencils standing in as potential sources of explosive material. But of course Ahmed's clock never looked like a suitcase bomb or any other kind of bomb to begin with. Everyone who saw it agreed. It didn't look like a bomb at all.
Just tangled wires. Or he could have put it in a different kind of case that wouldn't have looked like a bomb. Or he could have presented it differently, he didn't have to start using it during class or setting the alarms. There are plenty of ways Ahmed could have made his "invention" to not look like a bomb, but either deliberately or inadvertendly he did.
If he really wanted to make it look like a bomb he would have put SOMETHING in the pencilcase to simulate explosive material. Don't you agree? Have you ever seen a Halloween costume of a suicide bomber without some sort of simulation of explosive material involved? Everyone who knows what a bomb is knows bombs have explosive material. Everyone. Show a kid a clip of Wile E. Coyote and they will understand that explosions exist but they don't just happen out of thin air. You need a very special SOMETHING to make them happen. This means that if anyone had actually thought it looked like a bomb it would have been unintentional.
you might as well say that the linings in Ahmed's pencil case could have been made from explosive materials,
Ahmed's pencil case is tiny. The lining in his pencil case DIDN"T look like they were made of explosive material. Otherwise the people who have actually seen it would have treated them that way.
or it could be a remote trigger,
Why would anyone in the modern era make any kind of remote trigger that looks like that? Talk about nonsense. Remote triggers these days look like cell phones because they ARE cellphones. Which are still allowed in nearly all school districts in the entire country.
or he could have the explosives in his bag or at home, or ...
Sure, and I could have a sherman tank hiding in my garage. What does that have to do with Ahmed's clock or anything that happened to him that day?
The point is that the contraption looked remotely like a bomb you might see on tv:
The point of my suggestion (which you agreed with above) was that the picture of the pencil bomb only looked like it could be a bomb because of the pencils wired and arranged to look like they could be an explosive material. That's why it looks like a bomb. The ONLY key ingredient in a bomb is the explosive material. And the ONLY key ingredient in a hoax bomb is the appearance of explosive material.
nobody is saying that it was very convincing, but a bad hoax is still a hoax. And since it certainly didn't look like an alarm clock anymore, it could have been pretty much anything.
Wow, "It could have been pretty much
anything?" Could it have been a banana? No, stop being silly. It had a digital display with 4 digits and a colon between the middle two digits. It still looks like a clock even though you can see more of it's functional electronic parts.
A bad hoax may still be a hoax but there was and is no indication that there was ever a hoax. No hoax bomb and no bomb threat.
Of course the list I gave was being facetious, to show how silly your suggestions that the pencils in the pencil bomb may have been made from an explosive material.
See above regarding the point of my suggestion.
