After Uvalde, there’s still no gun control on the horizon. We can start by regulating hyper-destructive expanding ammunition then. MANY CIRCUMSTANCES OF this week’s elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, are incomprehensible. That a teenager did not need a license to legally buy two military-style long rifles. That police were unable to breach the classroom in which the rampaging shooter locked himself for well over an hour and, by some accounts, even prompted kids to draw fatal attention to themselves before neutralizing the gunman. That parents were getting body blocked and threatened with Tasers for trying to save their children themselves. And then there was the damage. The damage was so severe that agonized parents had to give DNA samples to identify their children. This horrific process would take hours and already hint at the baffling reality that the teenage gunman legally obtained not only a military-style weapon, but one of the most destructive forms of ammunition as well. As the gunman bragged in his online messages, expanding, or hollow-point, bullets open upon impact to cause more damage to their targets. The use of expanding rounds on the battlefield is a war crime. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court bars their use, and they are prohibited by a declaration of the Hague Convention (the U.S. never ratified the latter). According to the International Committee of the Red Cross, expanding ammunition causes “unnecessary suffering.” When Israel reportedly employed a version of these bullets in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian protesters had to have their legs amputated after being hit by a single bullet. The U.S. government and proponents of the hollow-point ammunition argue that that bullet reduces harm to nearby civilians, since it’s less likely to pass through its intended target or ricochet. Another reasoning often provided is that it’s necessary for hunting big game, so the animal doesn’t suffer and can be killed in one hit. One hit.
via intercept: We All Know Mass Killers Love the AR-15. Now Meet Their Favorite Bullet
siehe auch: AR-15s Were Made to Explode Human Bodies. In Uvalde, the Bodies Belonged to Children. Parents awaiting word on their kids were asked by police to provide DNA samples to help identify the children. S PARENTS WAITED in anguish for news about their children following the school massacre in Uvalde, Texas, they received a chilling request from police. Officers asked for DNA samples from parents to help establish the identities of the children who had been killed in the massacre, the second-deadliest school shooting in U.S. history. The request pointed to the obvious, horrifying conclusion that many of the children who had been killed were so grievously injured that it was likely impossible to identify their bodies. How we got here should be obvious: the AR-15 rifle. (…) It cannot be emphasized enough, however, exactly what the AR-15 is: It is a weapon of war. It was made to blow humans apart. It is successful in doing just that. The requests for DNA tests in Uvalde stand as a testament to the gun’s success, but the conclusion that the weapon excelled at blowing people apart was well documented by the U.S. military itself during early field tests. (…) IT IS HARD to comprehend a weapon like this being used against small children in an elementary school. The impact of the AR-15, a tool designed not just for killing but for ripping apart adult human bodies in the most extreme manner, being turned on the small, delicate limbs and organs of young children does not need to be imagined. The parents waiting outside the school in Uvalde for news of their loved ones who were asked for DNA tests were being clued into something horrifying about the types of weapons floating around American society, so easily available that even a disturbed 18-year-old could get his hands on them.
By <a href=”//commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Igor_at_work&action=edit&redlink=1″ class=”new” title=”User:Igor at work (page does not exist)”>Igor at work</a> – <span class=”int-own-work” lang=”en”>Own work</span>, Public Domain, Link – symbolbild