Bonaparte was a fan of the "whiff of grape" https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insurrection_royaliste_du_13_v... but we all know how that ended.
One obvious example of this is simply ammo. Military bullets don't expand as much as bullets available to cops or civilians. A military bullet is explicitly not allowed to be an expanding hollow point which really messes you up.
There are all sorts of international agreements on not using certain types of things in war - types of bullets are no exception.
Military "bullets" (they're called rounds, actually) are designed to be optimized for performance in a warfare environment. That means accuracy, and range. A hollow point round is design to expand and be a stopping shot - with one round - and not continue to travel large distances, which puts other people at risk. Cops can carry those because if they're in a crowded environment firing a hollow point round at a threat means less risk to anyone else who isn't a threat.
>There are all sorts of international agreements on not using certain types of things in war - types of bullets are no exception.
Yeah no one will care about this once an actual near-peer war kicks off.
exactly. Whatever you use in warzone you're risking that the same can be used against you, thus all the conventions on warzone weapons usage and prisoner treatment. Thus all the training, so that your soldiers wouldn't cross [too frequently] the redline to trigger the response.
I remember reading for example that in WWI new young soldiers, i think in Russia, were sometimes issued old style non-flat 3-edged rifle attached combat knives. Whether the knife is flat or 3-edged wouldn't make any difference during the actual stabbing and the immediate time after that. Where it makes all the difference is outside of the immediate combat situation - those non-flat knives would make for unnecessary horrible very hard to heal wounds, and thus if you were found with such a knife on a battlefield you'd be killed right there instead of taken POW. So the older soldiers would make sure that the newbies would promptly lose the knives.
The situation is similar to hollow-point bullets - they create those horrible wounds without any tactical benefit on actual battlefield.
In a civilian environment, the hollowpoints don't penetrate through walls and bodies as easily, meaning less risk of bystanders being harmed - and the local hospital has a lot more kit than your field medic.
https://www.icollector.com/Austrian-Model-1849-Agustin-Jager...
Do you have any idea of the level of misery inflected abroad? How can that even be compared?
Do the military not use pistol calibre weapons? There are frangible pistol rounds as well.
Basically if the argument is that it’s too dangerous to shoot at your enemies in war you probably shouldn’t be shooting it at your own citizens. Which I think is our point of agreement?
The Geneva Convention says nothing in particular about hollowpoints, so the verbiage has an "interpretation" by DoD about the Rules of Land Warfare that skirts around the issue . See https://www.justsecurity.org/25200/dod-law-war-manual-return...
I know this because I carried hollowpoints while deployed in an anti-terrorism capacity.
You're probably right on overpenetration though.
> accuracy
For accuracy up to a few hundred rounds you likely want boat tail hollow point, not a steel penetrator. Just look at the loads for prs, cmp, etc. Military bullets are not made to be the most accurate.
> Yeah no one will care about this once an actual near-peer war kicks off.
Probably right, though restrictions on bullet types have been around for like over a hundred years, and most modern US bullets adhere to the spirit of that.
It's also worth pointing out that there are a whole bunch of those international agreements that the US hasn't signed. Cluster bombs, for example.
It explicitly prohibits frangible/flattening/expanding ammo in war. The US hasn't signed that, but in practice they adhere to that part of it (but yes exactly as you point out, only for "war" not "anti-terrorism")
it definitely wasn't using it back then in USSR and nor in the 199x. I don't know about the last decade - quick googling shows that the hollow point have been introduced for police use during the last 10-20 years in several European countries.
In this context it makes sense to mention the USSR AK-74 5N7 "tumbling" bullet which was called "poison" bullet by Afganistan mujahideen for its bad quickly infection developing wounds. It is a jacketed lead with steel core inside bullet with few millimeters of air pocket in front. That air pocket made it kind of "a bit" of hollow point without fully triggering that classification. Due to that air pocket it would also easily tumble upon entry into the body thus creating disproportionally massive damage to the surrounding tissues which resulted in very hard to treat and easily gangrene developing wounds and thus it was called the "poison" bullet.
Did I understand that right?
