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Comment by beaner | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a historian but isn't there some ambiguity here? If war hadn't already been declared by the relevant governments, you can't be killing in the name of war.

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The British troops had set out to disarm the local militia. I have a hard time seeing how something that began with armed infantry units confronting each other at Lexington was not a war.

And by the way, when the British seized a Spanish fleet--which had imagined itself to be neutral--during the Napoleonic wars, their government stated that the United Kingdom had never been in the habit of starting wars with a declaration.

This is just semantics, but I think not. If you're attacking a military unit to achieve a military objective, murder feels inappropriate. In my opinion, murder tends:

* to be done by an individual, not a group

* tends to happen to one, or a few victims. It's odd to describe someone as murdering 70 people at once.

* tends to imply the victim was not professionally engaged in such a way that their death in those circumstances is not a plausible concern

* the motive is not political, else it is an assassination

You don’t want to open up that can of worms. Thousands of war deaths would qualify as murders if you used a declaration as the deciding factor.

What's the danger in "opening that can of worms"? IMHO the world might be a better place if there were a lot less killing, whether it's in the context of a war or not. Some killings throughout history are certainly justifiable or excusable, but it seems far more dangerous to me to stick one's head in the sand and avoid reflecting on whether each killing really needed to happen, or if the victim could reasonably have been spared without significant risk of harm or jeopardizing the larger cause (presuming the cause itself is just). "Murder" doesn't seem like an unreasonable label in the latter case. (Whether and how the killer should be punished in such situations is a separate question that I'm not taking a position on here.)

The danger is there are plenty of rebellions, revolutions and other "positive" conflicts where wars were never declared. You're basically going to be painting the people that took part in conflicts like the American revolution, Irish War of Independence, Indian War of Independence, Cuban Revolution, etc as "murders".

Well, back in the day wars did usually start with a declaration of war.

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