In November 2013, two days before Thanksgiving, something exploded in the adjoining backyards of two homes in rural Flippin, Arkansas and an eight-year-old girl named Debra Rackley was rushed to the Arkansas Children’s Hospital in Little Rock by helicopter. Her two shoes lay strewn across the grass where they were blown off her feet, a police officer noted in his report. Debra’s mother, Dana, says she was working at the assisted living home nearby. Her father, Robert, was also working at the Butterball turkey packing plant finishing last minute orders for the holiday. The children—seven of them in all—came home early from school that day for Thanksgiving break. The family was to leave for the three-hour drive to Robert’s mother’s house the next day and the kids were supposed to help clean the house to get ready to go.

Instead they were playing outside with their friends from the Thompson family next door, who were close in age to Debra and her brother Gary. A witness later told police that the gray residue found on a cinderblock near Debra’s shredded shoes was from an exploding target, a device supposed to detonate only when struck by a bullet or another high velocity impact, making it clear to a plinker 100 yards away whether or not his target has been hit. It’s instantly gratifying—and much easier than reeling in a paper target after every round.

If you don’t own a gun or shop often at stores that sell guns, you may have never heard of exploding targets before. But the list of brands under which they’re sold— Southern Thunder, Shockwave, Sure Shot, and ZOMBOOM!—is large and growing. The question of whether exploding targets should be restricted or banned is similar to the question of gun ownership in general: it pits people who believe they are using the targets legitimately against those who use them recklessly or illegally. Several jurisdictions have already restricted them, including the state of Maryland, several counties in California, and all National Forest Service land.



Blowing up a car with 50 lbs. of Tannerite. skintech33 / You Tube

According to one witness cited in the police report of the incident, the Thompsons had been using exploding targets in their backyard the morning Debra nearly lost her foot. At some point later that afternoon, Charles Thompson heard a loud pop from inside his house. “It sounded like a rifle,” he said. When his wife, Janine, went out to investigate, Debra’s older brothers were already carrying her across the two-acre expanse back to their house. Dana got a phone call from one of her older daughters and sped home in time to see first responders loading Debra into an ambulance. She rode with her daughter to where a helicopter picked her up and then watched as Debra was lifted up into the air and away.



For someone with a little determination, exploding targets are simple enough to make. You can do it at home using common household items known to contain the necessary ingredients. One is basically fertilizer and the other is a catalyst, like aluminum powder. There are slight alterations to the recipe—such as substituting potassium perchlorate as an oxidizer or adding in a bit of magnalium—that make the mixture even more volatile so that it will likely explode even if you use mere rimfire ammunition from a .22 pistol. Sold unmixed, each of these ingredients is inert and perfectly legal. Only when you mix them together are you manufacturing an explosive, which many have never been tempted to do, in the same way they aren’t tempted to mix bleach and ammonia.