David Allen Green has written an article at the New Statesman about the plans to give the British Transport Police machine guns for use on the tube. Further to his article, I want to point out some of the more frightening aspects that he doesn't mention. Lots of people, especially on the left, don't know a lot about guns, and this is usually a very good thing; the fetishisation of phallic murder doesn't really go hand in hand with standing up for the oppressed.
However, for better or worse, I do happen to know an alarming amount about firearms, and I do think it's important that we understand what these plans will mean.
The Evening Standard was first to pick up on these plans - here. The justification is the "rising threat" (more phalluses anyone?) from terrorism. They also mention that John Yates, Assistant Commissioner in the Met, has argued for more guns on the grounds of preventing a copycat attack of the 2008 Mumbai attacks.
What I want to focus on most of all, however, is what they're going to be armed with. The Standard reports that they will carry Glock 9mm pistols and MP5 carbines.
First, the Glock pistol. Two variants of this are currently used by the Met; the Glock 17 and the Glock 26. The 17 is your run-of-the-mill semiautomatic (ie fires one shot at a time, but doesn't need to be cocked between shots), and it has a 17-shot magazine. The 26 is a much smaller version of the 17, and is designed for 'concealed carry' ie so people can have one without you knowing. The smaller handgrip makes aiming harder and recoil more difficult to control, and the shorter barrel makes the gun less accurate. All pistols are pretty inaccurate; they're designed for only one thing, convenience. They tend to be used at very close range, and the lack of a butt makes them relatively hard to control.
The MP5 carbine, however, is a different and altogether more frightening beast. It's 70cm long and weighs 3 kilos, has a 15, 30 or 32 round magazine, and a holographic weapon sight. Usually the Met use the "SF" variant of this gun, which stands for "Single Fire", i.e. semi-automatic like the Glock pistol. However, this is not a given: The armed officers around Stockwell station were armed with a shorter, less accurate, and automatic version of this gun. "Carbine" means a gun shorter than a rifle, and, it's important to note, with a corresponding loss of accuracy. These guns do have a stock, so can be braced against the body for more accuracy than a pistol. However, if fired in automatic mode, they become quickly impossible to control, and extremely inaccurate. Using one in a confined space is staggeringly dangerous. We don't yet know what variant of this gun the BTP will be armed with.
However, most serious of all about this is the ammunition that's being rolled out to armed police in the UK. The Guardian picked this up in May. The police are to start using what's called "Hollow Point" or "Dum Dum" bullets. In the linked article, the Met's spokesman, Commander Jerry Savill, is knowingly lying about this ammunition. Allow me to give you a little background.
The name "Dum Dum" comes from a town on the outskirts of Kolkata, where the British empire founded an armoury. The bullets they made had a hole drilled in the front of them (pic here and here). This meant that once they entered a target they 'mushroomed', becoming much larger in frontal area, delivering much higher hydrostatic shock, tissue damage, and blood supply damage (if all else failed the target would bleed to death rapidly). This shows what happens to the bullet.
"Hollow Point" is just a technical description of what became culturally known as "Dum Dum". They are exactly the same thing. Savill is correct that some criminals drill holes in bullets in order to ape this effect, but the effect is only to make the bullets the same as the Met now use.
I can't stress this enough: Savill is lying - the bullets are the same.
The Met's argument for using hollow point ammunition is that they tend not to exit the body and will thus reduce bystander casualties. Firstly, this is very misleading; at close range (and given the inaccuracy of their chosen firearms, it will have to be close range) hollow point bullets are very likely to exit the body, and since they frequently fragment, that which exits the body could well be a spray of shrapnel rather than the single piece of a normal bullet. Secondly, and most seriously, it means that almost any bullet wound is likely to be fatal. You are very likely to bleed to death, suffer a stroke, heart stoppage or serious brain damage from shock even if hit in a normally non-lethal area. The amount of damage these bullets do compared to a normal "full jacketed" bullet is phenomenal. See this (horrible) video for an illustration of it.
Using hollow point bullets is one of the most serious escalations of lethal force by the police that has ever happened in the UK.
This idea of bullet exiting merits a little more unpacking, I feel, as it's the main justification given for this ammunition. Of course there can be no justification for murder, but there's no harm in pointing out the foolishness of even this argument to the psychopathic utilitarian. Firstly, there is absolutely no guarantee a hollow point bullet will not exit the body, whatsoever. Secondly, if there are people standing behind or near your target, police are absolutely instructed not to shoot - it's called 'not having a clear shot' and takes into account the fact that the officer may well miss the target anyway. Thirdly: even was there no exiting and police were 100% accurate and shot people in crowds, are we seriously listening to an argument that thinks reducing exit velocities is an important enough priority that we should kill people to achieve it? Because that's what using hollow point bullets will do.
Hollow point bullets have been banned in warfare since the 1899 Hague Convention. It was believed that they are too lethal. This ruling does not seem to be likely to be challenged, and rightly so. So why are the UK police using them? How is this legal?
Well, basically, because soldiers in wartime effectively have more laws to protect them than you or I. The Hague convention doesn't apply to police. The world's legal systems are more worried about bullets killing soldiers than their own civilian citizens, it would seem. It's important to remember too that it's never legal for a police officer to shoot somebody; they may be taught endless guidelines and so on, but if they shoot you, it's murder, it's the same as anyone else shooting you, legally speaking.
But of course the police are never prosecuted on the same terms. Even according to the cronyist and complicit IPCC, who dismiss hundreds of cases of violence and murder committed by police every year, UK police kill about 100 people every year. And yet not one police officer has ever been found guilty of murder or manslaughter in the UK. The CPS and IPCC have a lot of explaining to do; and the more guns we have everywhere and the more lethal the ammunition is, the more deaths are going to occur. I don't even need to talk about Jean Charles de Menezes here; shooting by the police is never acceptable, even if against a nutter with a bomb or a gun; we don't have the death penalty in this country, and even if we did, it would require a trial. Our doctors follow the principle of 'first do no harm' - why not our police? Why do the police not take ambulances when they carry guns? Why haven't tasers (terrible weapons, but less lethal) replaced firearms, as we were told they would?
I'll finish with a graphic I made in 2008. It charts the number dying from police contact, (source IPCC, and unquestionably a serious underestimate) against the number dying from terrorism (source Home Office), to help you see things in perspective - to advance against utilitarians the folly of arming against terrorism.
Who's the real threat?
However, for better or worse, I do happen to know an alarming amount about firearms, and I do think it's important that we understand what these plans will mean.
The Evening Standard was first to pick up on these plans - here. The justification is the "rising threat" (more phalluses anyone?) from terrorism. They also mention that John Yates, Assistant Commissioner in the Met, has argued for more guns on the grounds of preventing a copycat attack of the 2008 Mumbai attacks.
What I want to focus on most of all, however, is what they're going to be armed with. The Standard reports that they will carry Glock 9mm pistols and MP5 carbines.
First, the Glock pistol. Two variants of this are currently used by the Met; the Glock 17 and the Glock 26. The 17 is your run-of-the-mill semiautomatic (ie fires one shot at a time, but doesn't need to be cocked between shots), and it has a 17-shot magazine. The 26 is a much smaller version of the 17, and is designed for 'concealed carry' ie so people can have one without you knowing. The smaller handgrip makes aiming harder and recoil more difficult to control, and the shorter barrel makes the gun less accurate. All pistols are pretty inaccurate; they're designed for only one thing, convenience. They tend to be used at very close range, and the lack of a butt makes them relatively hard to control.
The MP5 carbine, however, is a different and altogether more frightening beast. It's 70cm long and weighs 3 kilos, has a 15, 30 or 32 round magazine, and a holographic weapon sight. Usually the Met use the "SF" variant of this gun, which stands for "Single Fire", i.e. semi-automatic like the Glock pistol. However, this is not a given: The armed officers around Stockwell station were armed with a shorter, less accurate, and automatic version of this gun. "Carbine" means a gun shorter than a rifle, and, it's important to note, with a corresponding loss of accuracy. These guns do have a stock, so can be braced against the body for more accuracy than a pistol. However, if fired in automatic mode, they become quickly impossible to control, and extremely inaccurate. Using one in a confined space is staggeringly dangerous. We don't yet know what variant of this gun the BTP will be armed with.
However, most serious of all about this is the ammunition that's being rolled out to armed police in the UK. The Guardian picked this up in May. The police are to start using what's called "Hollow Point" or "Dum Dum" bullets. In the linked article, the Met's spokesman, Commander Jerry Savill, is knowingly lying about this ammunition. Allow me to give you a little background.
The name "Dum Dum" comes from a town on the outskirts of Kolkata, where the British empire founded an armoury. The bullets they made had a hole drilled in the front of them (pic here and here). This meant that once they entered a target they 'mushroomed', becoming much larger in frontal area, delivering much higher hydrostatic shock, tissue damage, and blood supply damage (if all else failed the target would bleed to death rapidly). This shows what happens to the bullet.
"Hollow Point" is just a technical description of what became culturally known as "Dum Dum". They are exactly the same thing. Savill is correct that some criminals drill holes in bullets in order to ape this effect, but the effect is only to make the bullets the same as the Met now use.
I can't stress this enough: Savill is lying - the bullets are the same.
The Met's argument for using hollow point ammunition is that they tend not to exit the body and will thus reduce bystander casualties. Firstly, this is very misleading; at close range (and given the inaccuracy of their chosen firearms, it will have to be close range) hollow point bullets are very likely to exit the body, and since they frequently fragment, that which exits the body could well be a spray of shrapnel rather than the single piece of a normal bullet. Secondly, and most seriously, it means that almost any bullet wound is likely to be fatal. You are very likely to bleed to death, suffer a stroke, heart stoppage or serious brain damage from shock even if hit in a normally non-lethal area. The amount of damage these bullets do compared to a normal "full jacketed" bullet is phenomenal. See this (horrible) video for an illustration of it.
Using hollow point bullets is one of the most serious escalations of lethal force by the police that has ever happened in the UK.
This idea of bullet exiting merits a little more unpacking, I feel, as it's the main justification given for this ammunition. Of course there can be no justification for murder, but there's no harm in pointing out the foolishness of even this argument to the psychopathic utilitarian. Firstly, there is absolutely no guarantee a hollow point bullet will not exit the body, whatsoever. Secondly, if there are people standing behind or near your target, police are absolutely instructed not to shoot - it's called 'not having a clear shot' and takes into account the fact that the officer may well miss the target anyway. Thirdly: even was there no exiting and police were 100% accurate and shot people in crowds, are we seriously listening to an argument that thinks reducing exit velocities is an important enough priority that we should kill people to achieve it? Because that's what using hollow point bullets will do.
Hollow point bullets have been banned in warfare since the 1899 Hague Convention. It was believed that they are too lethal. This ruling does not seem to be likely to be challenged, and rightly so. So why are the UK police using them? How is this legal?
Well, basically, because soldiers in wartime effectively have more laws to protect them than you or I. The Hague convention doesn't apply to police. The world's legal systems are more worried about bullets killing soldiers than their own civilian citizens, it would seem. It's important to remember too that it's never legal for a police officer to shoot somebody; they may be taught endless guidelines and so on, but if they shoot you, it's murder, it's the same as anyone else shooting you, legally speaking.
But of course the police are never prosecuted on the same terms. Even according to the cronyist and complicit IPCC, who dismiss hundreds of cases of violence and murder committed by police every year, UK police kill about 100 people every year. And yet not one police officer has ever been found guilty of murder or manslaughter in the UK. The CPS and IPCC have a lot of explaining to do; and the more guns we have everywhere and the more lethal the ammunition is, the more deaths are going to occur. I don't even need to talk about Jean Charles de Menezes here; shooting by the police is never acceptable, even if against a nutter with a bomb or a gun; we don't have the death penalty in this country, and even if we did, it would require a trial. Our doctors follow the principle of 'first do no harm' - why not our police? Why do the police not take ambulances when they carry guns? Why haven't tasers (terrible weapons, but less lethal) replaced firearms, as we were told they would?
I'll finish with a graphic I made in 2008. It charts the number dying from police contact, (source IPCC, and unquestionably a serious underestimate) against the number dying from terrorism (source Home Office), to help you see things in perspective - to advance against utilitarians the folly of arming against terrorism.
Who's the real threat?
Good post. The graph hits it home really... the contrast of the cultural weight given to threats from the 'outside' and actual figures is striking.
ReplyDeleteIrrelevant curiosity: where'd you pick up all the gun knowledge? I'm hoping Guido Fawkes gets in another twist about this :P
Gabriel
Very amused to find responses claiming that hollow point ammo is the only humane choice, because "FMJ bullets will overpenetrate".
ReplyDeleteDoes it never occur to these people that we're not arguing that FMJ are good, but that cops with guns kill?
Isn't it even slightly alarming that anybody is arguing that a bullet has even slightly "humane" characteristics?
Maybe I've not been clear enough: TAKE GUNS AWAY FROM THE POLICE, NOW.
mkay?
Gabriel: if I told you that, then you might end up as scared as Guido! ;)
ReplyDeletelike
ReplyDelete