Comment by colinplamondon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by colinplamondon | Hacker News Reader

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Watching this in a YouTube video is gut-wrenching after the introduction, knowing what's going on ahead of time - I still feel sick five minutes later. But at the time? There was the man crouching against the corner of the house, looking like he could possibly have an RPG to blow the shooter out of the sky.

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.

I agree with a lot of your points - except there is no such thing as a non-lethal round fired from a helicopter. Any material you shoot at people at that velocity will kill them, and the velocity you need to make it non-lethal would be too low for any accuracy from that height. I did some work on non-lethal rounds and they need to be fired from an underpowered shotgun or grenade launcher to be slow enough not to kill people.

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 guessing by non-lethal he may have meant a warning shot (though possibly not).

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.

I'm surprised there was no warning shot

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.

> Why doesn't the helicopter have the ability to shoot non-lethal rounds in this kind of situation?

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.

There was the man crouching against the corner of the house, looking like he could possibly have an RPG to blow the shooter out of the sky.

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.

Sounds like you have made this kind of real-time indentification and stressful decision within two seconds or so. Can you elaborate on your experiences?

2 seconds? The 'copter was allegedly a mile away, which means at the M230's muzzle velocity of 805m/s, the bullet would strike 2 seconds after firing. You can't just wait for him to draw and aim, and then shoot at him. He'd likely have long enough to fire the thing.

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