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Comment by rurounijones | Hacker News Reader

"Picture of preparing to control demonstrators with $FIREARM"... (e.g. automatic weapons... a sniper rifle?!)

Could someone explain to me how the hell you "control" a large gathering of citizens by using guns without mowing down X number of them?

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I think the idea of having sniper overwatch is that if a single person in the crowd pulls out a gun or other lethal weapon, the sniper can engage just that guy.

In practice I doubt anything like that would actually work, but that's the theory.

Bullets don't magically stop inside a person, they tend to pass through. If a sniper fired on a single armed person in a crowd, they'd likely kill them and wound 2-3 others around them - even if they fired only a single shot.

That didn't work out very well for the British when they did it in Boston in 1770, and I can't imagine it ending well in Ferguson in 2014.

That's less of a problem now than it was back then. I'd be pretty comfortable taking a center of mass shot using 75gr TAP 5.56mm into a man's chest, especially at a plunging angle, without too much fear of overpenetration. I wouldn't do it with .308 m118lr, but I might do it with the right hollowpoint.

If someone in a crowd had drawn a weapon and were firing at the police, I'd consider this an acceptable risk, even if someone might get injured by the shot (the bigger risk would be the crowd moving in front of him, etc.)

It beats the alternative of hundreds of police responding with unaimed pistol/rifle/shotgun fire, for sure.

Just one shot in the air usually does the trick. This ain't a video game.

Brilliant! Now instead of a large demonstration of people we have a panicking large demonstration of people, hope no one gets crushed!

I don't think that counts as "controlling" a crowd in the USA.

(Plus other comment I made regarding unfortunate scenario where someone returns fire)

You don't need a fucking sniper rifle to fire a shot in the air.

I don't know much about guns but isn't that a negligent discharge?

You only ever fire your weapon when you intend to kill your target.

I don't know much about guns either, nor am I from the US, but according to Barron's Police Office Exam[1], cops must never fire warning shots, at least in NY.

[1] http://books.google.pt/books?id=1uD3HhEqegkC&lpg=PA217&ots=J...

That bullet lands somewhere.

Shoot one of them, or even just fire a warning shot, and observe that the less armed party tends to submit to the more armed party.

Until one nutcase or agent-provocateur in the crowd returns fire, then we have a nice little fire-fight in the midst of a load of innocents with automatic weapons and sniper rifles.

Isn't that how we got here in the first place? Shooting civilians seems to produce insurrection not submission.

Right, and it looks to me that the police in Ferguson are exerting a very large amount of control over the population, much more than normal.

They did shoot "one of them"[1], in the back of a police car.

[1] Michael Brown, who was unarmed.

You'd be surprised.

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