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.
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.
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?
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.
