Barack Obama is fortunate that these demonstration repression technologies did not exist during the time of Martin Luther King, because who knows if the civil rights movement would ever have succeeded if they did.
You see someone running away from a sound cannon, you just shrug it off since you aren't experiencing it yourself
Please, please, imagine yourself talking to someone and saying that.
You do not say, in real life, "You are an idiot [because you didn't know this fact]" to people you have never met before.
This is the Internet. There isn't enough civility on it anyway - at least do your part and don't detract from what exists.
At least the respondant was good enough to quote a source.
However, in my view as the civil rights protesters were 1 arguing for a greater (or at least closer to home) cause, 2 were set upon by dogs and 3 weren't going around breaking windows, the OP can quite rightly be called stupid for not looking into the facts a bit more rather than just mouthing off.
If you are an adult and you don't know about the lynchings, fire hoses, attack dogs, and other atrocities during the civil rights movement in the States, and you make an off-hand comment about Dr. King, you deserve less than my contempt.
For example, pictures of protesters being attacked by dogs and firehoses, when published in the north, did a lot to increase support for the civil rights movement. The insidious thing about a lot of the newer anti-protest weapons is that they are designed to produce boring photographs.
Look, you can have your issues with the police's response to a small group of protesters in Pittsburgh, but you know what the nice thing is about boring photographs? No one there is bleeding to death. No one has been singled out for humiliation and treated as less than human based on the color of their skin.
I read the OP as saying what he wrote.
It's precisely the success of the civil rights movement and other popular movements that have prompted the development of weapons intended to disperse demonstrations that don't create martyrs or inflame people who aren't actually present at the demonstration.
Thus, weapons like tasers and sound cannons increase the number of situations in which police are willing to use dangerous-though-not-usually-lethal force. Using them to quell protests is only one area where this is true, though it's probably the most notable.
What is worse is that the Civil Rights movement happened quite a while ago. I doubt that you were personally involved. This is like someone getting frisky about the Second World War or the Vietnam War. What is the point?
One problem with hitting people for what they say is that each instance of it contributes to a social norm of hitting people for what they say. Maybe you only hit people justifiably, but those who see you do it, and who are hit by you, might have worse judgment than you.
This is also a problem with incivility. Maybe you are a sufficiently good judge of character and intelligence that you single out idiots with perfect accuracy. But others who see your words, and especially those whom you call idiots, might have worse judgment than you, and they'll replicate your actions. This leads to a world where people are rude to each other rather than having level-headed arguments. So I don't think you should call someone an idiot, even when you're confident that they're an idiot. It has indirect harmful effects.
A post about how sound cannons work? Edgy for HN, but fair game. But a post about sound cannons used at a G20 protest written up in The Guardian and routed by way of Slashdot?
What's happening in this thread is a perfect example of When Bad Posts Happen To Good HN Members. _FLAGGED_.