104 • Zips, Pipes, and Pens riot leaders armed with small, deadly zip guns made inside the walls. Those guns recovered after order is restored are usually of the pipe and spring . 22-caliber variety, although one homemade weapon taken in an Iowa prison riot was a smoothly produced single-shot 9mm pistol. A prison spokesman noted, 'It was strong, welldesigned, and tightly built. The action was smooth and clean. The man who put this together is very talented. It's a shame his talent is not more positively channeled.' 1 think that view is tempered by which side of the cell door you walk. In the late 1980s, an enterprising newspaper reporter investigated a thriving firearms business in Graterford State Prison in Pennsylvania. He wrote, 'Prisoners were buying small, crude pistols built from scrap material right in the prison itself by other prisoners — no laws, no waiting period, no paperwork — It is gun control at its obvious worst." The reporter noted that the majority of prisoners wanted weapons for self-protection and that some did keep homemade guns hidden for just that purpose. Prisoners told him that guns cost between $300 and $500 each, depending upon quality of workmanship. In Northern California, the San Francisco Examiner noted that 'the manufacture of firearms in San Quentin maximum security prison has kept some inmates quite busy." The story quoted a San Quentin official as saying that they had confiscated 'dozens of homemade guns, gunpowder and other weapons during an internal investigation of illegal workshop activity." The prisoners reportedly made gunpowder by taking sulfur from match heads, charcoal from burned wood, and nitrates from dried urine. This propellant is used in their hand-held guns made by coating magazine pages with soap and water, rolling them into tubes, binding the tubes with string, plugging one end, and drilling a hole for a fuze. The fuze is made from toilet paper soaked in dissolved match heads. Projectiles can be anything from ballpoint pen