> Despite the ban on military use, hollow-point bullets are one of the most common types of bullets used by civilians and police,[4] which is due largely to the reduced risk of bystanders being hit by over-penetrating or ricocheted bullets, and the increased speed of incapacitation.
Heh, crazy. In the Netherlands there's now a discussion flaring up again about what looks like an assassination by the Dutch army of a group of Moluccan hijackers looking to bring independence for their people (part of Dutch colony Indonesia shifting towards independence).
One salient fact that arose recently is the use of hollow point bullets.
Why is this controversial? Because for incapacitation, not assassination, regular bullets would apparently have been more effective. (and of course, an order for such an assassination would've been extremely controversial, in fact illegal)
Pretty crazy to think such hollow points are standard issue in some places.
"Because for incapacitation, not assassination, regular bullets would apparently have been more effective."
Absolutely and totally false.
At the most fundamental level, you want the bullets to dump their energy in the target body. "Regular", as in Full Metal Jacket (FMJ) bullets are smooth and slippery, and more readily pass through a body (and are more likely to cause greater harm to anyone behind).
Hollow point bullets, if you're lucky, expand (which uses up some energy), and that larger bullet does more damage in its passage (also using up more of its energy).
Here's the key question you're implicitly asking: do you want to stop or kill the target? Per the above, unless you get a lucky hit on the central nervous system (CNS), people who get shot stop because they don't want to get shot again (perhaps 1/2 of the criminals shot in the US), the rest when they've lost enough blood, which bigger wound channels, destroying more tissue, do a better job of.
If you just want to kill someone, pump a lot of holes in them all the way through, for which FMJ is best. It'll be much harder for anyone to patch them up before they die of blood loss.
I put it as a simple law: lethality scales with number of hits, stopping power with the diameter of the bullet.
Caveat: if you don't luck out with a CNS hit or convincing the target he doesn't want to get shot again, there's a rather thin line between causing him to lose enough blood to stop fighting, and losing enough to die. But he still has a better chance to survive the former, and you and the other good guys have a better chance of surviving because you took him out of the fight faster.
>Caveat: if you don't luck out with a CNS hit or convincing the target he doesn't want to get shot again, there's a rather thin line between causing him to lose enough blood to stop fighting, and losing enough to die. But he still has a better chance to survive the former, and you and the other good guys have a better chance of surviving because you took him out of the fight faster.
To add to that, I've often heard that one of the reasons the M16 (AR15) uses 5.56mm as opposed to a larger round size is to encourage incapacitating/wounding shots as opposed to kill shots.
The idea being that a wounded soldier is both out of combat and utilizes additional enemy resources for care vs. a KIA soldier who is simply out of combat.
It's not clear what all the motivations were in adopting 5.56 mm and the AR-15/M16, besides their being totally political.
The unit of the Army responsible for this, which had done a good job up through WWII, was utterly corrupt by the '50s and sabotaged the copies of other designs, allowing the M14 to win, which was an inferior battle rifle, but not all that bad. (Hmmm, and if they did the M60 GPMG, they managed to field the absolutely worse modern GPMG in history; of course, by then we'd long sacrificed our normal means of developing machine guns on the altar of gun control.)
But it was rather heavy for Vietnam, and assault rifles were of course getting a lot of attention after the Nazis invented them and the USSR adopted one, which was also more reliable (the M1 and M14 designs leave way too much of the action out in the open).
And the "space age" AR-10/AR-15 got a lot attention (the Armalight subsidiary of Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corporation was set up explicitly to use aircraft type materials in weapons, e.g. aluminum and plastic, which are just fine if done right, which was the case with these two guns). The Air Force bought a bunch to defend their planes (rather lighter duty than infantry in the jungle), and McNamara, justifiably in terms of the Army's corruption, but displaying his usual total stupidity, e.g. in actually testing the weapon and cartridge, forced it on the Army.
Getting back to your point, as best I know, it was not thought the AR-15/M16 was bad at killing, in fact, one early very informal field trial ascribed miraculous wounding power to it. Which didn't turn out to be the case, but this was most certainly a minor consideration in its adoption, somewhere down there with it being reliable.
If you're familiar with McNamara's other decisions when he was the Secretary of the DoD, well, you can imagine he and his wizz kids might have thought such a thing, but their thoughts would likely be completely independent of any check on their reality. Heck, it wasn't until the 1980s that Martin Fackler figured out how 5.56 mm rounds actually behave, not that the Army gives a damn about that (the Marines are not surprisingly another story).
> At the most fundamental level, you want the bullets to dump their energy in the target body. "Regular", as in Full Metal Jacket (FMJ) bullets are smooth and slippery, and more readily pass through a body (and are more likely to cause greater harm to anyone behind).
When I served in the military, it was common understanding that Hague convention required use of "ball ammunition" was desirable because you want to inflict casualties on your opposition, not necessarily to kill them.
From what I was told, a soldier wounded in service to a proper enemy army is useful to you because it takes a lot of people and effort to rescue, resuscitate and rehabilitate the wounded soldier than one you simply kill. Also having a screaming squad-mate does impact morale downwards too.
Of course, all that reasoning could break down when dealing with irregulars and guerrilla warfare, but possibly not.
Here you're confusing war time operations, where for example you may only get one hit on a target due to him being distant or whatever, and deliberate killing is most certainly allowed, vs. what is ostensibly a peace time police style operation.
In the latter, an order to kill the targets no matter what is likely to be illegal (but in a case like this arguably a matter of foreign policy). What ammo is used it likely to be a lot less important than how it's employed. For example, per one account a number of them were hosed down with machine guns, and the only hollow point ammo used, or plausibly used (since it doesn't tend to work well in semi-auto or full auto weapons unless they were designed or modified for it) was in .357 revolvers used by the close combat team.
And strangely enough, 3 survived....
As for the Hague convention, I haven't studied it and its genesis in any detail, but the general idea was to make war less barbaric. Whatever is later said to troops who for political reasons are required to use much less effective ammo that's much more likely to get them killed is at minimum suspect. E.g. logically taking someone you shoot out of the war altogether, by killing or maiming them, is vastly superior to their coming back after convalescence.
> logically taking someone you shoot out of the war altogether, by killing or maiming them, is vastly superior to their coming back after convalescence.
Strongly disagree, as do at least a few military strategists throughout history.
I suppose it depends on who you're fighting (if you're fighting a ruthless Ghengis Khan all bets are probably off), but for Hague convention signees in general they will put a high priority on taking care of their wounded.
In fact anti-personnel landmines are generally designed to maim, not kill, for this reason.
It costs far more to take care of that soldier who got his leg blown off from the knee below, than it does to bury him. Both in time, material, logistics, and possibly morale.
So yes - if I'm in an all-out war, I'm going to want to significantly maim (as in make them incapable of fighting for an extended period of time and require extensive logistics to keep alive) a large portion of the enemy. This soaks up even more resources on their side to take care of them and only a certain percentage of those will return to the fight.
>When I served in the military, it was common understanding that Hague convention required use of "ball ammunition" was desirable because you want to inflict casualties on your opposition, not necessarily to kill them.
It was also probably common understanding that the Sergeant Major ate misbehaving enlisted men for breakfast.
That is just a barracks room tale, similar to the one that .50 BMG can only legally be used on material and not personnel (which you can allegedly get around by aiming at the enemies web gear or helmet).
The Hague convention banned hollow points because they were thought to be cruel and unnecessary. The convention continues to largely be obeyed because in general military use ball ammunition is better (eg it can shoot through light cover without deforming) and cheaper.
Just out of curiosity, and not because I want to single you out as a representative of your species, but, a lot of firearms enthusiasts share some common traits, and one of the more problematic ones is the obvious fallacy that there are "good guys" and then there are "bad guys", and that only the "good guys" are well-informed about proper weapons handling procedures, and that's because they're focused on "saving lives".
Another frequently displayed characteristic is to become pedantic about the technical aspects of gun specifications, and the precise language and acronyms surrounding tactics for close-quarter battles, or indirect fire trajectories or... whatever.
Do you guys realize the absurd cognitive dissonance of propping yourselves up with the obvious fallacy of the "good guys versus bad guys" routine, especially when you stand it up next to an appeal to authority through opaque vocabulary?
It may feel like you're winning the argument, but some of us are quick to see through this repetitive display that so many of you cling to, when arguing your point in favor of things like helping people bleed out faster, because we're trying to "save lives" here.
The life they are trying to save isn't the life of the person being aimed at: it's the person behind the wall behind the target. Every bullet is going to land somewhere, the question is how far away that where is, and what it will do when it gets there.
Ah, the curiously named "atavistic" did bring out one thing I may have not made clear: when talking about "arguing your point in favor of things like helping people bleed out faster, because we're trying to "save lives" here", one idea is that the target is indeed a "bad guy", and the sooner that bad guy is stopped, the fewer (additional) people he will wound or kill.
This is often critical for a "good guy" in close combat with one or more "bad guys", and generally particularly critical in the politically motivated hostage situations which prompted the discussion, where killing the hostages is a frequently desired eventual outcome of the "bad guys".
Which in my opinion definitively makes them "bad guys", to the point of my not being in the least upset at those higher ups who give sub rosa orders that they'd prefer none of the hostage takers survive.
The point you make is also strong, very frequently so in hostage taking situations, which is one reason good police snipers train obsessively. Important enough that I brought it up in my first paragraph of exposition in this discussion, as well as in, say, a recent one on the quality of the firearms leadership of NYC police, who for a long while saddled their men with FMJ bullets, to the determent of everyone but the self-satisfied and grossly ignorant anointed.
Indeed; the curiously named "atavistic" seems to be lumping me into a "species" (?) of humans I've never even heard of. Which I grant is possible, I'm a Gun Culture 1.0 type by upbringing (e.g. hunting and bulls-eye target shooting, even lettered in that in high school to my amazement) who since ... high school or thereabouts became an early Gun Culture 2.0 type (e.g. self-defense and sports based on that like IDPA and 3 Gun competitions (which I might consider competing in if not for a bad knee)), but there are so many gun subcultures in the US I might not have heard of the one he's referring to. Or know anything about, like the perennially persecuted Pennsylvania pigeon shooters. (But feel free to ask me how good moose minute steaks are. :-)
As far as good and bad guys, we might take it as axiomatic that a shooter considers himself to be a good guy and his targets as bad guys (even if only because he fears they could identify him after the crime), and therefore is at least somewhat interested in "terminal ballistics". I tried to keep it value neutral precisely because I wanted to focus on "how different types of bullet hurt people in different ways."
Needless to say, don't get me talking on "opaque vocabulary" unless you have a desire to learn about all this and can use a glossary of jargon like "permanent crush cavity", "hydro-static shock", etc. before diving into the literature. But I hope I avoided that when talking to the general HN audience.
Incapacitation is hard. The common belief that when you get shot you quickly go down and either pass out or are in too much pain or shock from the injury to do anything is pretty much a myth from movies.
There's some great information on this in the book "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers" by Mary Roach [1]. Even getting shot through the heart often leaves the person several seconds where they are conscious and able to act, giving them enough time to shoot back or shoot hostages.
Please don't use acronyms such as PMITA. If you want to say, "Pound Me In The Ass," as in, "Go to Pound-Me-In-The-Ass-Federal Prison," it is a lot easier to read in expanded form.
I don't know about you, but I think the fact that one may save the information from being banned from the internet by saving it to our computer is incentive enough to risk all the bullshit they may try.
If you were the only person besides the uploader to have a copy of the file, you should be worried. But now that potentially thousands of people have the same file, you don't have much to worry about. With that said, I wouldn't download it from my home IP address (or work) directly :).
Wouldn't that be pretty fucking insane though, to get imprisoned for opening a page that you had reason to believe the government didn't want you to see? Sentenced to life in prison for Unlawful Use of Eyesight.
If you're worried about that actually happening, you just might live in a police state, don't you think?
But let us never doubt that governments are a wondrous, necessary and Just institution. Sometimes they just have to torture you to death to maintain order for, you know, the greater good and all.
People have gone to jail for doing exactly what this looks like it could be -- clicking on a link, sent by a friend, containing material stolen in a data breach.
I didn't know what was in there. I'm not really interested in finding out what was in there, by having to talk to police about something the next time I fly somewhere.
Of course people have. People are being tortured to death by governments this very moment.
The point was the utter insanity of it all, of the same way of societal organization of rulers and subjects continuing for millenia on end.
Tyranny intensifies, and tyranny loosens up, but no matter how many times our rulers prove to us that having rulers is a bad idea, the masses keep accepting them anyway.
3 hours on HN and still not removed from bitbucket by some authority? I'm a bit surprised, because while the protest itself is nothing unusual given the approach they chose — I mean breaking doors, disclosing sensitive information, leave aside that it's not barbershops they are picking on, it's supposedly serious (I didn't find much about them, so i don't know for sure), close-to-military companies — it seems like something that won't be ignored. So, sadly, "more to come" part will stay empty, I believe.
Whether this is due to pressure or force from some authority or the author simply changing his mind remains to be seen. Like another commenter said, I have a sneaking suspicion that there will not be a long-lived "more to come" section if it's down in the first 4 hours.
As a casual reviewer, I'm skeptical of the quality of the GoPresto dataset in particular. Is it possible that this includes customers of a non-defense company with the same owner, for example?
Some googling and local knowledge turns up a number of people in there who I am quite confident are in no position to be purchasing teargas. I know they said there was some bogus data, but I'm talking >50% suspect entries.
The other dataset looks perfectly good, though. Addresses/emails almost 100% map to agencies or private security forces.
Has anyone given any thought to what the Police will use for riot control if tear gas is banned? I have been on the receiving end of Tear Gas. It was not a pleasant experience . However after about an hour I was back on my feet and good to go. As much as I didn't care for the tear gas, it would still cause less damage to a protester to get gassed than getting hit by a rubber bullet or a police baton.
37 comments
[ 1.6 ms ] story [ 89.6 ms ] thread> Despite the ban on military use, hollow-point bullets are one of the most common types of bullets used by civilians and police,[4] which is due largely to the reduced risk of bystanders being hit by over-penetrating or ricocheted bullets, and the increased speed of incapacitation.
One salient fact that arose recently is the use of hollow point bullets.
Why is this controversial? Because for incapacitation, not assassination, regular bullets would apparently have been more effective. (and of course, an order for such an assassination would've been extremely controversial, in fact illegal)
Pretty crazy to think such hollow points are standard issue in some places.
Absolutely and totally false.
At the most fundamental level, you want the bullets to dump their energy in the target body. "Regular", as in Full Metal Jacket (FMJ) bullets are smooth and slippery, and more readily pass through a body (and are more likely to cause greater harm to anyone behind).
Hollow point bullets, if you're lucky, expand (which uses up some energy), and that larger bullet does more damage in its passage (also using up more of its energy).
Here's the key question you're implicitly asking: do you want to stop or kill the target? Per the above, unless you get a lucky hit on the central nervous system (CNS), people who get shot stop because they don't want to get shot again (perhaps 1/2 of the criminals shot in the US), the rest when they've lost enough blood, which bigger wound channels, destroying more tissue, do a better job of.
If you just want to kill someone, pump a lot of holes in them all the way through, for which FMJ is best. It'll be much harder for anyone to patch them up before they die of blood loss.
I put it as a simple law: lethality scales with number of hits, stopping power with the diameter of the bullet.
Caveat: if you don't luck out with a CNS hit or convincing the target he doesn't want to get shot again, there's a rather thin line between causing him to lose enough blood to stop fighting, and losing enough to die. But he still has a better chance to survive the former, and you and the other good guys have a better chance of surviving because you took him out of the fight faster.
To add to that, I've often heard that one of the reasons the M16 (AR15) uses 5.56mm as opposed to a larger round size is to encourage incapacitating/wounding shots as opposed to kill shots.
The idea being that a wounded soldier is both out of combat and utilizes additional enemy resources for care vs. a KIA soldier who is simply out of combat.
The unit of the Army responsible for this, which had done a good job up through WWII, was utterly corrupt by the '50s and sabotaged the copies of other designs, allowing the M14 to win, which was an inferior battle rifle, but not all that bad. (Hmmm, and if they did the M60 GPMG, they managed to field the absolutely worse modern GPMG in history; of course, by then we'd long sacrificed our normal means of developing machine guns on the altar of gun control.)
But it was rather heavy for Vietnam, and assault rifles were of course getting a lot of attention after the Nazis invented them and the USSR adopted one, which was also more reliable (the M1 and M14 designs leave way too much of the action out in the open).
And the "space age" AR-10/AR-15 got a lot attention (the Armalight subsidiary of Fairchild Engine and Airplane Corporation was set up explicitly to use aircraft type materials in weapons, e.g. aluminum and plastic, which are just fine if done right, which was the case with these two guns). The Air Force bought a bunch to defend their planes (rather lighter duty than infantry in the jungle), and McNamara, justifiably in terms of the Army's corruption, but displaying his usual total stupidity, e.g. in actually testing the weapon and cartridge, forced it on the Army.
Getting back to your point, as best I know, it was not thought the AR-15/M16 was bad at killing, in fact, one early very informal field trial ascribed miraculous wounding power to it. Which didn't turn out to be the case, but this was most certainly a minor consideration in its adoption, somewhere down there with it being reliable.
If you're familiar with McNamara's other decisions when he was the Secretary of the DoD, well, you can imagine he and his wizz kids might have thought such a thing, but their thoughts would likely be completely independent of any check on their reality. Heck, it wasn't until the 1980s that Martin Fackler figured out how 5.56 mm rounds actually behave, not that the Army gives a damn about that (the Marines are not surprisingly another story).
When I served in the military, it was common understanding that Hague convention required use of "ball ammunition" was desirable because you want to inflict casualties on your opposition, not necessarily to kill them.
From what I was told, a soldier wounded in service to a proper enemy army is useful to you because it takes a lot of people and effort to rescue, resuscitate and rehabilitate the wounded soldier than one you simply kill. Also having a screaming squad-mate does impact morale downwards too.
Of course, all that reasoning could break down when dealing with irregulars and guerrilla warfare, but possibly not.
In no way is it "Absolutely and totally false."
In the latter, an order to kill the targets no matter what is likely to be illegal (but in a case like this arguably a matter of foreign policy). What ammo is used it likely to be a lot less important than how it's employed. For example, per one account a number of them were hosed down with machine guns, and the only hollow point ammo used, or plausibly used (since it doesn't tend to work well in semi-auto or full auto weapons unless they were designed or modified for it) was in .357 revolvers used by the close combat team. And strangely enough, 3 survived....
As for the Hague convention, I haven't studied it and its genesis in any detail, but the general idea was to make war less barbaric. Whatever is later said to troops who for political reasons are required to use much less effective ammo that's much more likely to get them killed is at minimum suspect. E.g. logically taking someone you shoot out of the war altogether, by killing or maiming them, is vastly superior to their coming back after convalescence.
Strongly disagree, as do at least a few military strategists throughout history.
I suppose it depends on who you're fighting (if you're fighting a ruthless Ghengis Khan all bets are probably off), but for Hague convention signees in general they will put a high priority on taking care of their wounded.
In fact anti-personnel landmines are generally designed to maim, not kill, for this reason.
It costs far more to take care of that soldier who got his leg blown off from the knee below, than it does to bury him. Both in time, material, logistics, and possibly morale.
So yes - if I'm in an all-out war, I'm going to want to significantly maim (as in make them incapable of fighting for an extended period of time and require extensive logistics to keep alive) a large portion of the enemy. This soaks up even more resources on their side to take care of them and only a certain percentage of those will return to the fight.
It was also probably common understanding that the Sergeant Major ate misbehaving enlisted men for breakfast.
That is just a barracks room tale, similar to the one that .50 BMG can only legally be used on material and not personnel (which you can allegedly get around by aiming at the enemies web gear or helmet).
The Hague convention banned hollow points because they were thought to be cruel and unnecessary. The convention continues to largely be obeyed because in general military use ball ammunition is better (eg it can shoot through light cover without deforming) and cheaper.
Another frequently displayed characteristic is to become pedantic about the technical aspects of gun specifications, and the precise language and acronyms surrounding tactics for close-quarter battles, or indirect fire trajectories or... whatever.
Do you guys realize the absurd cognitive dissonance of propping yourselves up with the obvious fallacy of the "good guys versus bad guys" routine, especially when you stand it up next to an appeal to authority through opaque vocabulary?
It may feel like you're winning the argument, but some of us are quick to see through this repetitive display that so many of you cling to, when arguing your point in favor of things like helping people bleed out faster, because we're trying to "save lives" here.
This is often critical for a "good guy" in close combat with one or more "bad guys", and generally particularly critical in the politically motivated hostage situations which prompted the discussion, where killing the hostages is a frequently desired eventual outcome of the "bad guys".
Which in my opinion definitively makes them "bad guys", to the point of my not being in the least upset at those higher ups who give sub rosa orders that they'd prefer none of the hostage takers survive.
The point you make is also strong, very frequently so in hostage taking situations, which is one reason good police snipers train obsessively. Important enough that I brought it up in my first paragraph of exposition in this discussion, as well as in, say, a recent one on the quality of the firearms leadership of NYC police, who for a long while saddled their men with FMJ bullets, to the determent of everyone but the self-satisfied and grossly ignorant anointed.
None of that post gets picky about terminology or tactics.
It's just a description of how different types of bullet hurt people in different ways.
You're, uh, a little bit too quick to jump on whatever you think you're jumping on.
As far as good and bad guys, we might take it as axiomatic that a shooter considers himself to be a good guy and his targets as bad guys (even if only because he fears they could identify him after the crime), and therefore is at least somewhat interested in "terminal ballistics". I tried to keep it value neutral precisely because I wanted to focus on "how different types of bullet hurt people in different ways."
Needless to say, don't get me talking on "opaque vocabulary" unless you have a desire to learn about all this and can use a glossary of jargon like "permanent crush cavity", "hydro-static shock", etc. before diving into the literature. But I hope I avoided that when talking to the general HN audience.
There's some great information on this in the book "Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers" by Mary Roach [1]. Even getting shot through the heart often leaves the person several seconds where they are conscious and able to act, giving them enough time to shoot back or shoot hostages.
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Stiff-Curious-Lives-Human-Cadavers/dp/...
I'm curious, but not PMITA-potential levels of curious. There's really likely not a lot of useful information in there for me, anyways.
edit: ah, found it. It's on the second page.
If you're worried about that actually happening, you just might live in a police state, don't you think?
But let us never doubt that governments are a wondrous, necessary and Just institution. Sometimes they just have to torture you to death to maintain order for, you know, the greater good and all.
I didn't know what was in there. I'm not really interested in finding out what was in there, by having to talk to police about something the next time I fly somewhere.
The point was the utter insanity of it all, of the same way of societal organization of rulers and subjects continuing for millenia on end.
Tyranny intensifies, and tyranny loosens up, but no matter how many times our rulers prove to us that having rulers is a bad idea, the masses keep accepting them anyway.
https://web.archive.org/web/20141020203759/http://warpolrele...
Whether this is due to pressure or force from some authority or the author simply changing his mind remains to be seen. Like another commenter said, I have a sneaking suspicion that there will not be a long-lived "more to come" section if it's down in the first 4 hours.
Some googling and local knowledge turns up a number of people in there who I am quite confident are in no position to be purchasing teargas. I know they said there was some bogus data, but I'm talking >50% suspect entries.
The other dataset looks perfectly good, though. Addresses/emails almost 100% map to agencies or private security forces.
here's the link the gopresto dump, from above
http://rghost.net/private/58630972/989ff79551ac37019982d8117...
Missed cs_dump.txt though.