> These are weapons that would violate the Geneva convention, but we're okay with them to disperse a crowd.
Isn't that a category ban that came out of a couple specific members of that category that were used and had particularly nasty effects? And then countries' domestic law enforcement rules tend to be defined in different terms.
It is. People think that the "Frangible bullets and teargas banned by the Genevan Conventions" means that they're seen as too cruel to use in war. Unfortunately the "wisdom of crowds" that we've created on social media has decided that it does.
The reality is that we're talking about the views of people in 1925, as informed by a previous group of people in the late 1800's. They were far more concerned with avoiding the use of gas as a weapon than in dealing with the LD50 of the various gasses.
Likewise with frangible/hollow-point ammunition, it isn't even banned by the Geneva Conventions, it was banned under the now-defunct Hague Convention. For better or worse they thought that these "tumbling" or "expanding" bullets were designed to inflict intentionally greater suffering. Who knows maybe the versions that existed in the late 1800's did too, the ones today aren't used because they're worthless against even modest body armor.
But again, people just see text on a picture in a meme and take it to heart.
Except they are used today. Russian 5.45 is famously highly prone to tumbling due to its design with bubble of air in the front of the bullet (even more so than rifle rounds in general). If we look at American 5.56mm, the original M193 was prone to fragmenting, which the original study reports on what would eventually become M16 noted as the reason why it's capable of creating more devastating wounds then the then-standard M80 ball. And modern M855A1 fragments even more reliably (at lower velocities) while still punching through armor.
Pretty much any OTM round is effectively expanding and/or fragmenting (depending on velocity) as well...
So for all practical purposes this convention hasn't been followed for literally decades now. The pretense is that we claim that all these bullet designs just happen to do what they do. Although IIRC the US military authorized use of 9mm JHP in some circumstances, as well, so I think even that veneer is mostly gone by now.
> Who knows maybe the versions that existed in the late 1800's did too
The ones now and back then aren't any different. They do inflict greater suffering when the injury isn't immediately lethal. They essentially maim the target.
There's a legitimate case to be made for home defense because they won't penetrate common building materials nearly as far. It makes them much safer to anyone in the surrounding area.
There are also cases where the additional stopping power is invaluable, for example against a pack of dogs.
You can argue that any GSW that isn't immediately lethal inflicts suffering, I'm not sure how an expanding head changes that. In a handgun round mushrooming is absolutely about terminal ballistics rather than protection against over-penetration, but it is true that expanding .223 and frangible rounds are focused on over-penetration
But again the biggest reason you don't see expanding rounds in war is (especially modern) armor defeats them far more easily than standard .223.
An argument that modern body armor has largely negated the incentive does not imply that the ethical concerns don't exist. They are entirely separate points of discussion.
> You can argue that any GSW that isn't immediately lethal inflicts suffering, I'm not sure how an expanding head changes that.
It's a matter of intent and degree. If we collectively threw up our hands every time we encountered a grey area we'd never be able to agree on anything.
The point is that in the event that a weapon fails to kill the target, there are ethical concerns if it does more damage, particularly long term damage, than absolutely necessary. There's no need to make warfare even worse than it already is.
Isn't that a category ban that came out of a couple specific members of that category that were used and had particularly nasty effects? And then countries' domestic law enforcement rules tend to be defined in different terms.