Comment by AStonesThrow
2 days ago
Most commenters here are calling this court case ridiculous, and injustice, but honestly, I think anyone who wants to try this should be gently discouraged and ultimately prevented.
So this guy was a bit mental, and decided that his hobby was to amass a literal "Periodic Table" on display, in his home? Did he have, like, a lot of friends who often dropped by to admire his Table and encourage him in his progress? Or, more likely I suspect, he was a lonely sad sack who would do anything to attract another human being's close interaction.
It also seems that he was amassing a lot of broken junk. Are there, like, photos of his collection, because surely it could not be overly attractive or neat? If he is basically collecting obsolete and unwanted crap then that is a sorry excuse for any "home display".
And yes, perhaps all this material in one place was 100% safe for our hero. Fine. But still, when he has visitors over, can he guarantee their safety too? If a dozen other people got this same "collector's bug" and amassed such a collection, could they also do it 100% safely and legally?
I hope that the outcome from this case is that they can engage a social worker and an agency to help him tip all this rubbish into the bin and find some productive, social hobbies that will enrich him and somehow help with his challenges of mental illness. The last thing a mentally ill person needs is to be isolated with a barely-legal, dangerous hobby. Sheesh.
This isn't really random behavior from some mentally unwell person. There's an entire Reddit community for element collectors:
https://www.reddit.com/r/elementcollection/
And various companies that sell elements in nice display cases to support this hobby.
Sure, it's not your typical model car/train or card collecting hobby, but it's a harmless hobby nonetheless not a cry for help.
Fascinating that you take the court's ruling that he has a "mental illness" at face value.
How would you like it if one of your harmless hobbies was declared illegal overnight and your home raided?
How would you feel if the only way the court lets you go home without a prison sentence is to agree to be declared "mentally unfit"?
I am not sure that you and I read the same article, because you seem to be misrepresenting material facts in some sort of attempt to bait or troll us, so I will not dignify this with an actual response.
The item in question, and presumably the rest of his collection, was purchased in the form of an attractive resin display cube containing an absolutely minuscule amount of radioactive material: https://www.luciteria.com/element-cubes/plutonium-for-sale
Okay, this may have been rash judgement on my part. Sources are confusing and perhaps a bit conflicting. I was under the impression that some of this was a pile of junk.
But if he was really just serially ordering attractive cubes of Lucite from this same California website, then it makes a big difference. One, he was truly invested in the aesthetics of a real collection on his shelves. Two, this stuff was not merely "safe" but completely "safed" and legal in California.
It seems if it was illegal to import to Australia then that's a local problem. Perhaps he should've proceeded with more caution, but I can also agree that authorities sort of blew it out of proportion to have the HAZMAT circus come down his street and make his neighbors wonder what sort of bomb-maker they were living with.
Try not to be a cunt.