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Comment by noego | Hacker News Reader

> In the video, the protester who was shot is first seen joining a black-clad mob of people who chase a riot officer and tackle him to the ground. They kick him and beat him with what appear to be metal pipes.

> At one point, the protester approaches a second police officer who is standing nearby with a handgun drawn. Just after the protester hits the officer with the pipe, the officer fires at the man at point-blank range.

I'm just as pro-democracy as the next guy, but I can hardly fault a police officer for shooting someone in the shoulder when they are being hit with a metal pipe.

I hope the pro-democracy movement in HK returns to its origins of peaceful demonstrations. I don't think its good for the movement's long-term sustainability to turn violent.

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What is the end game to your advice? China can successfully plant saboteurs into the movement and will win that game. The only people watching HK with sympathy are outsiders, and any intervention must be weighed against war.

We already have mass persecution if ethnic Muslims in China with reports of organ harvesting. The world (who?) isn’t going to war with China over something like that.

> "I hope the pro-democracy movement in HK returns to its origins of peaceful demonstrations."

Peaceful protests have limits in what can be achieved, if anything, and have actually slowly bit by bit lost a little freedom every year. They've been protesting every July 1 since handover-day 1997 [1], as well as every anniversary of Tiananmen [2], as well as every new year demanding universal suffrage and further influence of mainland China [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_1_July_marches [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorials_for_the_1989_Tiananm... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_new_year_marches

> I can hardly fault a police officer for shooting someone in the shoulder when they are being hit with a metal pipe

There's plenty of occasions where HKPF just brutalized people who were no threat at all, and as far as shooting guns goes, good luck blaming this on the protesters: https://www.reddit.com/r/HongKong/comments/dc4fc8/another_hk...

> I'm just as pro-democracy as the next guy, but I can hardly fault a police officer for shooting someone in the shoulder when they are being hit with a metal pipe.

I mean, they could run away. The police are there to enforce a new State order. A lot of people don't want that order.

> I hope the pro-democracy movement in HK returns to its origins of peaceful demonstrations. I don't think its good for the movement's long-term sustainability to turn violent.

Well, there's absolutely no hope of a non-violent movement bringing democracy to a state capitalist society. It's never happened, it never will happen. It requires States, which organizationally have diffuse self-preservation functions, to give up power. It's not even clear they can do that. People aren't seeking centrist American approval, they're seeking to self-govern rather than be handed from one massive military power to another.

Americans and many Europeans generally approve of violent police action, which killed 998 people in the US in 2018. Many in shot isolated situations that in no way resemble the wide scale resistance of Hong Kong's pro-democratic movements.

I suppose we should applaud HK police's forbearance up until this point, from the western perspective. American cops would just open fire and then gleefully make up lies about the nature of the demonstrations or their supporters.

>American cops would just open fire and then gleefully make up lies about the nature of the demonstrations or their supporters.

You say that but since the 90s there has been a concerted effort to not let federal law enforcement escalate to that point (at least in group situations like this). In small swat team type situations they can be very trigger happy but in an ongoing clash like this the politicians would (and have) hold the cops to a reasonable ROE.

Edit: Federal law enforcement

> You say that but since the 90s there has been a concerted effort to not let law enforcement escalate to that point (at least in group situations like this).

You say this as if the inaugural protesters weren't rounded up, detained for illegal lengths of time, and subject to spurious lawsuits and fines that were enormously damaging to even passerbys.

> but in an ongoing clash like this the politicians would hold the cops to a reasonable ROE.

You say this like there aren't still ongoing lawsuits of brutality cases from Ferguson or that BLM isn't still organizing widespread civil rights demonstrations that draw hundreds to thousands and then being chased off by cops with tear gas, truncheons, and "non-lethal" bullets.

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