Read on Twitter
For @sciam I took a look at less-lethal weapons. As is probably unsurprising, weapons designed for narrow use in edge cases are easily & commonly misused against crowds. People suffer as a result while police forces shrug & say "would you prefer batons?" https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-less-lethal-weapons-actually-do/">https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/w...
https://twitter.com/AthertonKD/status/1273092703010471936">https://twitter.com/AthertonK...
One of the more fascinating pieces of teargas history I learned reporting this is that CS (the standard tear gas in use today) was simultaneously fielded in Vietnam and in the US, with each instance referencing the other as a justification. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-less-lethal-weapons-actually-do/">https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/w...
For the US forces in Vietnam, selling tear gas as a "riot control agent" helped the counter-insurgent mission justify itself as using effective but less-than-deadly tools to flush people out of cover. For police stateside, the Vietnam use case branded CS as effective and proven.
A broader theme, woven into the piece & drawing heavily from the work of @stschrader1, is that much of what we know as policing today has its orgins & evolution as the practices of occupying colonial forces. "Baton rounds" start in British Hong Kong, "rubber bullets" in Ireland.
Another part which didn& #39;t quite fit in the final version is that while tear gas is prohibited from battlefield use in war, the Geneva Conventions *explicitly* have a carve out for "riot control agents," which marks tear gas as what it most clearly is: a weapon of colonial warfare
The reason tear gas is prohibited from battlefield use between uniformed militaries (nations, practically speaking) isn& #39;t so much about the gas itself, but about the inability to distinguish between the less-lethal tear gas and explicitly lethal other chemical weapons in war.
It& #39;s the sort of thing where, if a nation had a stockpile of, say, mustard gas, and heard that their forces were hit by an unknown gas, they might respond with what they think is in-kind and escalate in an especially grim way. Laws of war are weird, but that& #39;s what that is.
One other note: using tear gas to disperse people is, as these things go, a use that mitigates the harms from the gas, as people leave a space and the aerosol dissipates. Using tear gas to pin people in place for arrests, say in conjunction with kettling, exacerbates these harms.
