Whoever was shooting lived through this once in real-time. Everyone else gets to view it again and again, stop the action, if they please, back up...
The guy doing the shooting was trigger happy, but murder is probably too strong for this. Clearly this is a fucked up example of what happens in the midst of urban warfare, but more than that is going beyond the context of the video.
After the shooting, a black van runs up to collect bodies and help the wounded, in a very organized fashion--- it doesn't seem unreasonable that they thought that they were dealing with a team radio'd by insurgents.
I think the bigger problem here is that you have a godlike helicopter raining death on people below, with no on the ground intelligence.
Why doesn't the helicopter have the ability to shoot non-lethal rounds in this kind of situation? Why can't they communicate with the man crawling after the shooting? If we can fly UAVs from Vegas, why can't we fucking drop a remote ground vehicle to deal with grey area situations without killing eight people?
This seems like a disgusting failure of capabilities more than malicious murder.
Even if it did, I'm pretty sure the lethal kind are called for when you see an RPG pointed at you. We know it wasn't one now, but if it had been me in that helicopter? I doubt I would have chosen non-lethal.
What really would help is better cameras. If the gunner had better resolution and zoom, he would have clearly seen it wasn't an RPG. If we give these guys the power to be judge, jury, and executioner, we also need to give them the senses to make an informed decision. That technology is possible and just like uparmored HUMVEES for whatever reason it is not available to these guys and innocent people died because of it.
But hey, lets go back to the broader generalizing on the state of US society and the blood-thirstyness of its troops because after all, it is the internet.
Im surprised there was no warning shot; I vaguely know an apache gunner in the UK army and he has talked about how a warning shot is the usual approach in many situations.
A warning shot wouldn't be an option. If you look about 8~9 minutes into the video when they are attacking the van, the gunner is having trouble even hitting the van. A commenter higher up mentioned the helicopter was about a mile distant.
The helicopter was at very long range; no one of the guys on the ground looked at it. The "RPG" was pointed to the ground. You can see that it was a camera before he starts to fire. Further, an RPG takes two seconds or so to draw, time which the gunner could've used for confirmation. It didn't look as a threat to the helicopter, once seen; still the gunner freaked out and shot them.
Very organized team? They were two guys in a dirty van.
Yes, it wasn't, strictly speaking, murder. Still, it was unjustified, criminal use of force.
Edit: This is a fantastically unpopular comment! Is it my lack of respect for the "Thou shalt not Monday-morning quarterback, no matter how badly the quarterback screwed it up" commandment? :)