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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

#271

Post by pjc50 »

baseballdork wrote: post #194
Fezzik wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always find this sentiment a little silly - if the US President went in to full dictator mode and had the support of the military, do you really think a militia of armed citizens would be anything but gnats against the windshield of the United States Armed Forces? And if s/he did not have the support of the Armed Forces, it would not be a very effective dictatorship and you would not even need guns for a rebellion.…

Depends on the circumstances, probably. 100 million armed people is nothing to ignore. I would also assume that the enforcement would be via the police, not the military.

It would probably start with ICE. The gradual expansion of their powers to hold any person in prison until they can prove they're not an immigrant. The continued expansion of use of those against Latino communities. Voter sweeps: go to polling stations and arrest everyone who looks like they might be a Democrat. That kind of thing.

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

#272

Post by goles »

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.

In defensive shootings the objective is to stop the immediate threat which is best accomplished by shooting center mass and damaging the vital organs. Shooting to maim will give the attacker the opportunity to disable you or take the weapon from you which will likely result in your death.

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

#273

Post by daenz »

Fezzik wrote: post #168
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".

I always find this sentiment a little silly - if the US President went in to full dictator mode and had the support of the military, do you really think a militia of armed citizens would be anything but gnats against the windshield of the United States Armed Forces? And if s/he did not have the support of the Armed Forces, it would not be a very effective dictatorship and you would not even need guns for a rebellion.…

Good reads and sums up the basic ideas: https://imgur.com/a/WnTzIxR

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

#274

Post by bonerman69 »

Fezzik wrote: post #168
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".

I always find this sentiment a little silly - if the US President went in to full dictator mode and had the support of the military, do you really think a militia of armed citizens would be anything but gnats against the windshield of the United States Armed Forces? And if s/he did not have the support of the Armed Forces, it would not be a very effective dictatorship and you would not even need guns for a rebellion.…

What % of the military do you think will fight for the president? You only need enough weapons(dependent on that %) to create enough of a _mess_, to make it never worth pursuing.

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

#275

Post by [deleted] »

exabrial wrote: post #140
program_whiz wrote: post #13

Sure, the kid was swinging at the officer, and I suppose that warrants the officer acting in self-defense. But another question is, what are the protesters supposed to do? The government has all the power, and can simply snuff out any resistence. If you just stand in the streets, they really don't care, they are going to take your freedom. Imagine if the US suddenly had a dictator that just decided they were going to…

Sadly, right now a US presidential candidate, Beto O’Rourke, is promising to violently remove firearms from law abiding US Citizens.

[deleted]

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

#276

Post by MS90 »

tialaramex wrote: post #159
derefr wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

You probably could not, unless you set your EC-135 up way ahead of AF1 and took a crazy pursuit angle and timed the impact perfectly. The maximum speeds of the two planes are within 10mph of each other (at least, a base C-135 and a base 747. I'm sure there's some variance between those and an EC-135 and AF1 due to equipment loadouts and whatnot).

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

#277

Post by heavyset_go »

SkyBelow wrote: post #183
davinic wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are several studies on this that conclude otherwise. For example[1]: "Firearm prevalence is significantly related to total violent crime (B = .600, p [1]: http://www.cjcj.org/uploads/cjcj/documents/jpj_firearm_owner...

So the study found a correlation between suicide by firearm and violent crime, not firearm prevalence and violent crime. They try to justify using suicide by firearm as a stand in for gun ownership, but if they don't have good stats on gun ownership to use for this study, then how could the previous studies have been able to make the connection between suicide by firearm and prevalence since they would need the same…

Proxies are used all of the time in studies and analysis of information that can't be directly collected. To claim that proxies are why people lose faith in science is absurd.

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

#278

Post by aasasd »

bhupy wrote: post #174
Fezzik wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always find this sentiment a little silly - if the US President went in to full dictator mode and had the support of the military, do you really think a militia of armed citizens would be anything but gnats against the windshield of the United States Armed Forces? And if s/he did not have the support of the Armed Forces, it would not be a very effective dictatorship and you would not even need guns for a rebellion.…

The US (with its support of the military) has been at war in the Middle East for nearly 2 decades now with insurgents. The argument is not that a rebellious citizenry will necessarily win a war, it's that it will draw out a bloody civil war so long and so expensive as to be a form of mutually assured destruction, the risk of which acts as a check in and of itself.

To clarify, are those insurgents buying rifles at shops, or are they supplied with military-grade missiles by friendly countries?

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

#279

Post by woutr_be »

dmix wrote: post #185
woutr_be wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been fairly critical of protestors before, but in this instance, you can see the police going in for a fight, already heavily outnumbered. I'm not sure what they expected to happen, but the officer drew his gun almost instantly and shot a high school kid at point blank range. There's been other instances today where police was just looking to fight protestors, and as soon as they realized protestors weren't havi…

> There's been other instances today where police was just looking to fight protestors And protestors obviously looking to fight police. They swarmed the other officers partner who was being beaten on the ground and he was next. I find it shocking so many people were expecting him to just take it the beating or 'run away' and leave his partner there. There's a very good argument for having police on the streets when…

> And protestors obviously looking to fight police. They swarmed the other officers partner who was being beaten on the ground and he was next.

While true, protestors can't just resort to drawing their guns and firing warning shots. Police have a civil duty to uphold the law and be professional, not to go out fighting protestors and then flash their guns to scare them away when they're losing.

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

#280

Post by Redoubts »

maxerickson wrote: post #134
sudhirj wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same thing the original Americans did when protesting the massively better trained and armed British Army. Keep their wits about them and keep fighting. If anything the war in Afghanistan has proven that technology is no match for resilience and grit.

Afghanistan is a fool's mission, not a war. If the US had the desire and stomach to wage total war against the people of Afghanistan (gladly we do not), there would not be a lingering quagmire.

I suppose civil wars and internal conflicts have a habit of being much more vicious, so this is something to consider.
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