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Comment by Houston | Hacker News Reader

To those who actually downloaded the torrent:

Did any of you happen to watch the 4-second-long video clip of what appears to be 4 men being gunned down by helicopter? Any theories on why it's there?

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Old video from Iraq of a gunship returning fire. These are passed along A LOT from police office to office. Nothing news breaking.

Just seems kind of tasteless, I guess.

I agree. Same could be said about passing on pictures of over weight people at Wal-Mart or ugly people with memes typed on them. Different strokes for different folks.

While I understand what you're saying, I think the professional setting in which that material is being passed around warrants a discussion on whether or not it should be passed around at all.

I might be making a mountain out of a molehill, but I can't help the fact it irked me that a video clip that shows the death of 4 men - most likely passed around as something "cool" and something to be glorified - is being passed around by law enforcement.

Lots of cops are former Marines, soldiers, etc. Im guessing you've never hung around with guys like this? I was a Marine for ten years; stuff like this gets shared and no one's giggling about it. You are definitely making a mountain out of a molehill. I say that based on personal experience.

What's the point in sharing it in this setting?

I could speculate on any number of reasons. A large number of my relatives work in defense contracting and you see the same videos passed around there as well. I admit that I feel slightly unnerved by the videos sometimes, but if you're an engineer working on gunships or a former soldier for whom this was a part of daily life for a while, I don't think there's anything really blameworthy in finding videos from the war interesting on some level.

It's just interesting, that's all. For me personally, seeing people killed on the battlefield isn't a good feeling, but it's not strange either. It's not outside the sphere of my experience. I know that people get killed in war and sometimes it's tragic but it's still interesting to watch firefights and gunships engaging targets.

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