Yep, and we've been there before, quite recently actually. See Bloody Sunday on wikipedia. Paratroopers killed 13 people at peaceful demo when they mistakenly thought they had come under fire. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloody_Sunday_(1972)
Though I wouldn't call the 1970's "quite recently", similarly, the US had four deaths of protesters in 1970, known as The Kent State Shootings or Kent State Massacre:
I suppose I meant 'quite recently' in that I would never have imagined that something like Bloody Sunday could happen in a modern 1st world democracy, until we studied it in Modern History at school. To put it in context, the next most recent military action against UK civilians was the Peterloo massacre in 1819. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterloo_Massacre
I'm 46. I was just shy of my fifth birthday when the Kent State Shootings occurred. Age surveys suggest that people on HN are predominantly in their 20's and 30's. Attitudes about time aren't necessarily age dependent. I find that people from older cultures tend to have a longer view of time than your typical American. I do happen to be American. "Mate" implies you are not.
I heard this somewhere (quite probably on HN actually)
"In America 100 years is a long time, in Europe 100 miles a long distance"
Your perceptions are shaped by your culture, and particularly in the US people rarely look at history before the revolutionary era (if they even know about that) so 100 years would be almost half of history. Whereas an older empire might trace some of it's roots as far back as the dark ages.
The inquiry into the killings only fininished last year - and, as you would expect, there was a lot of coverage in the UK of Bloody Sunday so isn't something that has been forgotten about (and given the nature of the killings it really shouldn't be):
