Police Using Paintballs to Tag Iranian Protestors | Hacker News Reader

Police Using Paintballs to Tag Iranian Protestors

keepingthechange.blogspot.com

17 pointsrobg12 comments

According to this person, the security forces use these paint balls to single out protestors, who they believe should be arrested. Sharp shooters are positioned in nearby locations (where they cannot be seen by the demonstrators) and launch paint balls at selected targets,

If anyone else has played Paintball here, sharp-shooting to that sort of needed level of accuracy is pretty much impossible. Just looking at that picture makes me laugh at how a sharp-shooter would "snipe" a select person in that crowd. It's possible to jack up the FPS on a gun to shoot hot (and shoot further), but even then it's not really possible to guarantee a hit, given how a paintball is aerodynamically pitiful compared to an actual bullet.

Anyone else who has played paintball here can confirm that paint can easily fly several feet off its intended trajectory in as short as 40 yards. In a crowd, just 6 inches would be enough to mark the wrong person.

So if they're trying to target a unique person in a crowd who is supposedly going to be arrested? Highly unlikely. I could definitely seem them shooting hot to disperse crowds though, paintballs sting quite nicely without a good layer of clothing.

It's probably almost as effective to hit random people and make them think that they're are being singled out as a ringleader. Bad things happen to political detainees in Iranian jails (http://thesop.org/journalism/2008/02/05/cries-within-iranian...) It would certainly scare the crap out of me to be tagged.

If I am not mistaken, paintball guns are essentially pneumatic smooth-bore muskets. Definitely not "sniper" quality.

You're not mistaken. Just like the old muskets, the rounds bounce around inside the barrel and are very inaccurate. However, what many people don't know is that prolonged use of a weapon leaves plastic on the inside of the barrel that can induce spin, but the complete opposite of what is desired in a rifled barrel.

I've seen paint balls consistently fly several feet wide over a 25-50 foot distance. If these 'snipers' don't have a rifled barrel (highly doubtful), they have the potential to miss every single one of their targets during an average protest (like 3+ hours), and these protests are apparently going on all day. If these snipers are staying hidden, they're obviously not going to be interested in changing weapons or barrels.

Have any of you ever served in the military?

I'm just wondering.

Do you think they really care about accuracy?

the security forces use these paint balls to single out protestors, who they believe should be arrested

If this is really their goal, then I would think accuracy would be high up the list of concerns... i.e. nailing the right protester to be arrested.

Sure, they could just nail anyone but then that sort of defeats the purpose of marking the protesters they really want...

The purpose is fear.

My boss used to live in communist poland, and this was a very common tactic. Instead of shooting paintballs, they squirted people with liquid that would only show up under a black light. Police would later hold checkpoints with black lights to scan potential protesters.

So protesters should all smear themselves with a similar paintball colored ink. If everyone has the ink on them, police would need a new way to separate the fakes.

The very act of doing that would make them a protester who is more subversive than average, and worthy of taking. And with such an inaccurate weapon, they aren't actually looking for specific targets; they're trying to intimidate.

Getting random people even benefits the leaders. If the population knows that bad things happen to political prisoners, and that the mildest of protesters are being marked as leaders, then some will lose their nerve.

This is not a good UI for tagging.

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