ComradeKingfisher [he/him]

  • 0 Posts
  • 8 Comments
Joined 5 years ago
Cake day: July 26th, 2020
  • ComradeKingfisher [he/him]@hexbear.nettonews@hexbear.net•Bulletins and News Discussion from September 9th to September 15th, 2024 - Viva Sandino! - COTW: NicaraguaEnglish
    39·
    6 months ago

    Yes, and also for “less than lethal” rounds that can very much severely injure and kill a person when it hits the right spot.

    https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/at-close-range-police-fire-rubber-bullets-that-can-maim-or-kill-protesters

    spoiler

    A study published in 2017 in the BMJ found that 3% of people hit by rubber bullets died of the injury. Fifteen percent of the 1,984 people studied were permanently injured by the rubber bullets, also known as “kinetic impact projectiles.”

    Rubber bullets should be used only to control “an extremely dangerous crowd,” said Brian Higgins, the former police chief of Bergen County, New Jersey.

    “Shooting them into open crowds is reckless and dangerous,” said Dr. Douglas Lazzaro, a professor and expert in eye trauma at NYU Langone Health.

    In the past week, a grandmother in La Mesa, California, was hospitalized in an intensive care unit after being hit between the eyes with a rubber bullet. Actor Kendrick Sampson said he was hit by rubber bullets seven times at a Los Angeles protest.

    Freelance photographer Linda Tirado said she was blinded by a rubber bullet at a protest in Minneapolis.

    In an email, Minneapolis Police Department spokesperson John Elder said, “We use 40 mm less-lethal foam marking rounds. We do not use rubber bullets.”

    Elder didn’t mention the brand name of the foam marking rounds used by Minneapolis police. But a website for the “Direct Impact 40 mm OC Crushable Foam Round” depicts a green, bullet-shaped product described as a “point-of-aim, point-of-impact direct-fire round.” The site says the projectiles are “an excellent solution whether you need to incapacitate a single subject or control a crowd.”

    No one knows how often police use rubber bullets, or how many people are harmed every year, said Dr. Rohini Haar, a lecturer at the University of California-Berkeley School of Public Health and medical expert with Physicians for Human Rights. Many victims don’t go to the hospital.

    Police are not required to document their use of rubber bullets, so there is no national data to show how often they’re used, said Higgins, now an adjunct professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. There are no nationally agreed-upon standards for their use.

    When aimed at the legs, rubber bullets can stop a dangerous person or crowd from getting closer to a police officer, Lazzaro said.

    But when fired at close range, rubber bullets can penetrate the skin, break bones, fracture the skull and explode the eyeball, he said. Rubber bullets can cause traumatic brain injuries and “serious abdominal injury, including injuries to the spleen and bowel along with major blood vessels,” said Dr. Robert Glatter, an emergency physician in New York City and a spokesperson for the American College of Emergency Physicians.

    Firing rubber bullets from a distance decreases both their force and their accuracy, increasing the risk of shooting people in the face or hitting bystanders, Lazzaro said.

    Physicians for Human Rights, a nonprofit advocacy group based in New York, has called for rubber bullets to be banned.

    The British military developed rubber bullets 50 years ago to control nationalist rioters in Northern Ireland, although the United Kingdom stopped using them decades ago. Rubber bullets are used by Israeli security forces against Palestinian demonstrators. French police were criticized for using rubber bullets last year after dozens of “yellow jacket” demonstrators were blinded and hundreds were injured.

    “Rubber bullets are used almost every day somewhere in the world,” Haar said. “Using them against unarmed civilians is a huge violation of human rights.”

  • ComradeKingfisher [he/him]@hexbear.nettochapotraphouse@hexbear.net•Do you know what I hate about white people? Skiing. Its basically winter golf.English
    2·
    1 year ago

    I don’t know where you are, but where I live this has never been the sort of second hand stuff that is even remotely accessible to poor people.

    Good point, the availability of secondhand equipment isn’t something that ever crossed my mind.

    I grew up in the California Bay Area. The PMC types buy equipment, use them for a season or less, then get rid of them on Craigslist and/or yard sales—the surplus drives the prices way down, especially during off-season. It’s still too expensive if you’re struggling to put food on the table and pay rent, but it’s viable if there’s breathing room in the budget.

    In the 90s and 00s a decent set up of used jackets, pants, helmets, skis, and boots could be had for under $100, and last you for well over a decade. Hell, my dad is still using gear he bought in the 90s.

    Gear is more expensive now. We recently had to kit up my cousin’s bf, and we managed to scrounge everything for $155. He’s a min wage worker, but in our cultures multigenerational living is the norm, and that reduces the cost of living enough that spending that much won’t put him in the red. He also didn’t have spend everything at once, because our family could loan him whatever he was missing while we searched for good deals.

    Lift tickets also aren’t what they used to be. Growing up, lift tickets at smaller resorts could be had for $10-15, so overall the sport was affordable for working class refugees with only a highschool education and a middling income. Now the cheapest lift tickets at the smallest resorts are $25, and that price is only available once a month.

    Had my parents fled to the US now or within the last decade instead of when they did in the 80s, we wouldn’t have been a skiing family. With the increase of lift ticket prices, we remain a skiing family only because we have all the gear already, and living with my parents lets me save up enough to buy us season passes. If I were living on my own I wouldn’t be able to afford it, nor would my parents since they’re on a fixed income.

    Skiing with family and friends are some of my fondest memories, and introducing new people to the sport and watching them fall in love with it is phenomenal. Watching year after year as that joy becomes increasingly out of reach for the working class is enraging. Don’t even get me started on the insulting, increasingly low pay of resort workers, destroying another solid avenue that working class kids used to use to afford slope time.

    You could never really be poor and ski around here, but to the average middle class family it was doable. Now only those in, just below, or above the upper middle class can afford it. It’s only going to get more bougie from here on out, which is a travesty.

    There are endless tax payer money maintained ski routes in this country during winter that take over walking routes, hiking routes etc. You are not allowed to do anything there but ski during the ski season. The people who do it are all upper middle class or otherwise in a position where they can afford the equipment. The poors don’t even get to use the area for walking during this time.

    That blows big time, I’m sorry. While the resort slopes are exclusive to skiers, the miles and miles and miles of hiking trails in the Sierra Nevada are open to regular and snowshoe hikers, as well as cross country skiers. Y’all are getting hosed. We’re all getting hosed. Death to capitalism.

  • ComradeKingfisher [he/him]@hexbear.nettofood@hexbear.net•The Black Tea - GENERAL MEGATHREAD for Monday, 25th January 2021English
    0·
    4 years ago

    • Call EDD because I’ve not been paid in six weeks despite still having money in my claim balance and being on extension already

    • All numbers are maxed out and won’t even put you on hold

    • latest call has them saying that they’re closed and to call back during regular business hours (M-F, 8AM-8PM)

    • it’s 1pm on a Monday

    Goddamn, I’m extremely lucky that I’ve some cushion (which I really don’t want to dip into because that’s what I’m using to pay for top surgery this summer), but the vast majority fucking don’t. Guys on r/unemployment are talking about how they’ve not been paid for weeks. They’re out of money for food, their cars are being repo’d, they’re month’s behind on rent, they’ve not been able to pay bills and their credit is now destroyed, etc. There’s been next to 0 communication from EDD, and the new reps they’ve onboarded are giving out conflicting information on the phone. It’s been a month since the new bill passed and the systems are still FUBAR.

    Oh, and Gavin Newsom is reopening the state under pressure from businesses, despite SoCal being at 0% ICU capacity, with both the UK strain and they newly ID’d LA strain ripping through the pop.

    This past year I’ve seen the homeless pop only grow and grow, and we’ve not even hit the lifting of the eviction moratorium yet. Doubly infuriating because WE HAVE ENOUGH FUCKING HOUSING FOR EVERYONE.

    It’s really fucking hard to not be a doomer knowing everything that’s coming down the pipeline :doomer: