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Protester shot in chest by live police round during Hong Kong protests

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Re: Protester shot in chest by live police round during Hong Kong protests

#151

Post by SkyBelow »

swarnie_ wrote: post #22
nvahalik wrote: post #18

> Imagine if the US suddenly had a dictator This is why we have the second amendment. And the constitution as the thing to which office-holders swear allegiance to rather than to "the party" or "the president".

Non-American here, i never really understood your second amendment or how you cling to it in the modern age. What are a couple of rednecks with assault rifles (which arguably they shouldn't be able to purchase anyway) going to do against semi-autonomy kill droids being flown from a bunker in the desert?

You don't use it to go after the drone, you use it to go after soft targets. It is also a matter of scale and depends upon how the lines get drawn in the conflict. If the scale is just a couple of rednecks, then you aren't looking at an actual use case. Try a couple million rednecks instead.

Re: Protester shot in chest by live police round during Hong Kong protests

#152

Post by admax88q »

hanniabu wrote: post #116
swebs wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the problems are unrelated to gun ownership. If you were to plot the percent of gun ownership vs the crime rate among various states or even countries, you wouldn't find much of a correlation.

> I think the problems are unrelated to gun ownership Exactly, if the same logic for guns were used on other things then you'd have people up in arms saying nobody should be able to drive cars because of how many people kill others with them.

Lol are you seriously comparing cars to guns?

Guns have one primary purpose, to shoot things.

A car's primary purpose is not to hit things.

Re: Protester shot in chest by live police round during Hong Kong protests

#153

Post by moate »

geggam wrote: post #110
swarnie_ wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-American here, i never really understood your second amendment or how you cling to it in the modern age. What are a couple of rednecks with assault rifles (which arguably they shouldn't be able to purchase anyway) going to do against semi-autonomy kill droids being flown from a bunker in the desert?

As a note there are 20 million ex military in the US, most of which are armed. So the US civilian population has an out of shape military with small arms at around 10x the size of the standing military.

That's assuming they side with the civies and don't rejoin the standing military.

Truth is, we have no idea what a US civil war might look like. There would be military defections as well as citizens joining the government. With no understanding of what the factions would look like, it's difficult to forecast blindly (not that you couldn't make projections based on certain groups leading the antagonists side and how the public at large might react).

Re: Protester shot in chest by live police round during Hong Kong protests

#154

Post by Thriptic »

ixtli wrote: post #99
swarnie_ wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-American here, i never really understood your second amendment or how you cling to it in the modern age. What are a couple of rednecks with assault rifles (which arguably they shouldn't be able to purchase anyway) going to do against semi-autonomy kill droids being flown from a bunker in the desert?

From experience, people who are able to live their lives casually collecting weapons here are also able to live pretty disconnected from the reality of these types of situations. We're long, long past a world where a rag tag band of ideologically enfranchised citizens could oppose the police. The fantasy of standing up to The Gubment comes from two things: 1) a rambo fantasy. a serious overestimate of your own skills…

I categorically disagree with this. Look at the enormous damage small groups of armed people have imparted on the government even recently. Two delusional guys in Boston shut down the entire city for multiple days and necessitated a state-wide response by blowing up a few pipe bombs, killing a police officer, and going on a car chase. This response cost millions and millions of dollars and resulted in millions of dollars more in lost productivity. The Waco Texas debacle necessitated a huge federal response which we are still feeling the effects of to this day. The Oklahoma City bombing was perpetrated by two guys who didn't even use firearms.

I'm certainly not endorsing any of these actions and I believe the government responses were warranted, but there is a clear history of rebellious armed civilian groups being huge problems for governments.

Re: Protester shot in chest by live police round during Hong Kong protests

#155

Post by lostlogin »

MagnumOpus wrote: post #87
_iyig wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What are a couple of rednecks with assault rifles (which arguably they shouldn't be able to purchase anyway) going to do against semi-autonomy kill droids being flown from a bunker in the desert? The common refrain goes “about as well as the Taliban,” who currently negotiating an American withdrawal after 18 years of serious U.S. military attention.

> “about as well as the Taliban,” So you mean that living standards drop back by 100 (or 1000) years? But seriously - asymmetric warfare works best against scrupulous adversaries who claim the moral high ground and stop short of "salt the earth" warfare. China doesn't, the CCP won't mind starving out an entire city or state to get them to stop resisting, just like the Soviets didn't.

The conduct of the alloed troops in Afghanistan can’t really be called scrupulous. One of the examples in the below link has troops mutilating corpses and collecting severed fingers.

And on the flip side, the Russian troops there were badly equipped and half starved at times too - Boys In Zinc by Svetlana Alexievich is a depressing series of accounts from there.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:War_crimes_in_Afgha...

Re: Protester shot in chest by live police round during Hong Kong protests

#156

Post by jbattle »

cjslep wrote: post #122
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What are a couple of rednecks with assault rifles (which arguably they shouldn't be able to purchase anyway) going to do against semi-autonomy kill droids being flown from a bunker in the desert? The point is to increase the cost of violence against the population. The Swiss bunker / guerrilla strategy. Also, there is no reason to suspect asymmetric vectors like autonomous drone armies would accrue solely to state…

> The Swiss bunker / guerrilla strategy. As an American living in Switzerland, this is not a fair comparison. The Swiss strategy involves mandatory service (with the backing of the government), short and long term preparations against an outside invading force (with the backing of the government), highly regulated gun ownership (with the backing of the government). It's always wielded with the backing of the governme…

So the Swiss have ... a well-regulated militia? Wish we had thought of that!

Re: Protester shot in chest by live police round during Hong Kong protests

#157

Post by dx87 »

mlevental wrote: post #83
dx87 wrote: post #6

Not to defend what the police have been doing overall during this protest, but in this specific incident you can see the protestors beating a police officer on the ground, and the protestor who got shot was swinging a metal pipe at the police officer that shot him.

https://www.reddit.com/r/HongKong/comments/dbqsfl/video_show... shows cop ran into the crowd and had a clear exit path (not necessary to shoot to remain safe)

It looks to me like he ran in to try and protect the police officer that was surrounded on the ground, and didn't fire until he was attacked. I don't know the context around this specific event, but it doesn't look like the "police officer runs in and shoots child protestor" narrative that is being pushed on reddit.

Re: Protester shot in chest by live police round during Hong Kong protests

#158

Post by emptysongglass »

nvahalik wrote: post #18

> Imagine if the US suddenly had a dictator This is why we have the second amendment. And the constitution as the thing to which office-holders swear allegiance to rather than to "the party" or "the president".

This is absurd. Any chance a rebellious citizenry had armed to the teeth evaporated with standing armies.

Gun owners of the US cling to this ideal even while experiencing the worst spate of mass shootings in its history. There is no solution to this other than disarming.

Re: Protester shot in chest by live police round during Hong Kong protests

#159

Post by tialaramex »

derefr wrote: post #91
thaumasiotes wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the simple fact is that the government will win in the game of “who has more guns and power”, just as it would in the USA I do not actually agree with the premise that, in this modern day, governments can no longer be overthrown. Civil wars are not won on the basis of "who started with more guns?".

Most countries you’re thinking of as counterexamples don’t have an equivalent to Air Force One (= near-complete invulnerability for said dictator) or nuclear submarines with SLBMs (= near-complete invulnerability for said dictator’s hard power.) Nothing a militia does storming US land civil or military infrastructure would matter to a US dictator, any more than it would if a foreign military did so. The US military d…

"By Dawn's Early Light" is a movie with James Earl Jones as "Alice" the general aboard an EC-135 carrying out the "Looking Glass" mission (a 24/7 airborne command and control, now obsoleted) after a surprise attack. Jones' character decides to ram Air Force One to eliminate the hawkish Secretary of the Interior who has assumed the role of President - and thus resolve a deadlock so that the actual President (who has survived, badly wounded and unable to prove his identity to those aboard Air Force One) can countermand US forces and prevent a retaliatory strike which would inevitably cause World War III.

It's made for TV but I thought it did a surprisingly good job. I don't know whether you actually could chase and collide with the plane normally designated Air Force One in an EC-135, but certainly I'd bet on military pilots to give it their best shot if their commander explained the consequences otherwise.

Re: Protester shot in chest by live police round during Hong Kong protests

#160

Post by MichaelApproved »

vnchr wrote: post #89
dx87 wrote: post #6

Not to defend what the police have been doing overall during this protest, but in this specific incident you can see the protestors beating a police officer on the ground, and the protestor who got shot was swinging a metal pipe at the police officer that shot him.

The police are allowed to shoot someone in the leg. Lethal force is not the only option with a firearm.

Citation needed.

Which police force trains their officers to shoot people in the leg?

My understanding is that, if you need to shoot someone, there’s an immediate threat. You shoot for the largest target, so you won’t miss and so you do the most damage.

If you aim for the leg, you’re likely to miss. Even if you hit the leg, there’s a femoral artery in there. If you hit that person will bleed out in just a few minutes.

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