What It Feels Like To Be Hit With Turkish Tear Gas
fastcoexist.com
fastcoexist.com
To combat the effects carry a bottle of solution made up from water and sodium metabisulphate (sold as Campden tablets used in home brewing) as this combination neutralises the effects of CS. If you cannot get this use clean water to rinse the eyes and skin affected.
That was the first thing my mom told us when as kids went to protests against Pinochet. CS reacts with water, even if you are not feeling the effects water can make the chemical react again.
The CS gas effects are just temporal, no longer than 5 minutes... try to survive them.
I've been documenting social movements in chile since 10 years ago, i've been exposed to CS directly more than a hundred times. I know you will panic, but never try to use clean water on an affected area.
salud
ps. I don'know if sodium metabisulphate works, but cops use a chemical when they got hit by CS, if this is the thing they use ill give you a pizza when you come around here.
when the gas comes, remain calm. When you feel yourself panicking from the gas, breath through the onion. For some reason, the smell of the onion (in Turkey I've also seen people using lemons) seems to re-center you and mitigate some of the instant psychological effects of the gas (i.e. suddenly you're in a poison cloud).
Never been sprayed directly, but I was cleaning out a dorm room for a summer-time job and someone had left a bottle that went off by accident. And somebody in a club I was in decided to mace the room one time... ugh...
[2] http://sublunarorb.it/post/52144010490/liveblog-of-the-turki...
The reasoning behind gun ownership is more like this: if the government institutes martial law / comes to take my guns or property / commits some huge atrocity against me or my family, gun owners will be able to defend themselves. This isn't a completely accurate view, obviously, but it's the general feeling I get from growing up in the US.
Even in other areas, there are myriad restrictions on where a person may carry. For instance, nearly all federal buildings, many "sensitive" locations identified by the state (such as within a quarter mile of a school), national parks, etc...
And those who carry legally are well aware of how fragile their rights are - one run-in with a policeman having a bad day can cost you your right to ever touch a gun again.
The reasoning behind gun ownership is more like this: if the government institutes martial law / comes to take my guns or property / commits some huge atrocity against me or my family, gun owners will be able to defend themselves. This isn't a completely accurate view, obviously, but it's the general feeling I get from growing up in the US.
One thing to add to this - the point of the second ammendment is not only to ensure the rights of individuals to protect themselves and their property from both other citizens and the government. It's presense is also intended to act as a reminder to those who wield the power of the government that they are the servant rather than the master.
"The beauty of the Second Amendment is that it will not be needed until they try to take it."
"being necessary for the security of a free state" isn't high-minded idealistic philosophy on the nature of the individual human, it's meaning "to keep our country safe from those Europeans over there, should they come a-knocking". Instead of "it's there so our government will fear us", it's "it's there so our government can call on us, and we will have the right skills to serve".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BART_Police_shooting_of_Oscar_G...
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic. [http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html]
There are so many categories that this story (and most other stories currently on the front page) fits. While it is an interesting article, what is it doing here with 49 upvotes?
Then you'll be glad you read this article on Hacker News!
Besides, we'll need all those compilers and operating systems when we re-program the robots to fight the system! /snark
That said, getting hit with tear gas sucks. If you're wearing contacts, really bad things can happen...
http://www.blackcrosscollective.org/attachments/File/textzin...
Turkey has bought $21 million in tear gas and pepper spray – mainly from US and Brazil – over the past 12 years, Turkish media reported.
[1]: I use supposedly since there is no obvious way for me to validate this, though the language on there is turkish...
Gas masks? I own an old Israeli Civil Defense mask with some sealed canisters that expired in the 90s. Might work, but not sure if anyone in Turkey would wear it -- the filters have Hebrew printing on them.
My Army-Navy store has some M17s but I think they're out of filters.
It does have one positive side effect, however: it cleans out your sinuses like nothing else I've seen. :)
A large part of the effectiveness is also psychological. When people first experience CS they tend to overreact and experience secondary symptoms not created by the CS. After a couple exposures, you know what to expect and CS becomes more of a nuisance than something to fear. You don't intentionally walk into a cloud of CS but you can kind of shrug it off if you do.
A major point of the exercise is to instill trust in your gas mask and your ability to use it correctly.
When I did it, we put on our gas masks, entered a little building full of gas, stood around a bit feeling the tingle on our exposed skin, then one-by-one were told to take off the mask and try to say something (I think it was our name and rank), then run out.