The narrative around rubber bullets right now is protecting systematic abuse of US citizens by law enforcement by misdirecting you toward individual “bad apples”. This is important to understand because right now, the police are shooting a lot of people (including journalists) in the LA area with rubber bullets, and there’s a journalist who got shot in the eye in 2020 with a rubber bullet who is dying in hospice care as a result of her injury.
The narrative is “individual police are using rubber bullets wrong”. Rubber bullets are “less” lethal, which means that they are still lethal under certain circumstances, such as at “close” distance. Close distance means under 36 yards (108 feet). In addition, even at non-close distances, the bullets are supposed to be bounced off the ground rather than fired directly at a person. The idea is that this is the correct way to use the rubber bullet ammunition, and if an individual chooses to do something else, that’s a failure of the individual.
First off, though, individual police never get into any kind of trouble for using this ammunition wrong, so whatever disciplinary apparatus exists for police misconduct, it is not working — or perhaps it doesn’t see that individual behavior as a problem.
Second, consider that the original intent of rubber bullets was to do exactly what we see them doing, at any range under 100 yards, and without any fancy bouncing them off the ground bullshit. They were intended to kill some of the people that are hit by them.
Third, if police departments (and the cities that employ them) didn’t want to kill or seriously injure a significant number of people who are shot with rubber bullets, they could demand a different kind of ammunition from manufacturers. They could demand a rubber bullet ammunition that works at 10 to 50 yards and doesn’t need to be bounced off the ground. The manufacturers would follow the money and create that ammunition.
In short, the entire law enforcement apparatus is fine with severely injuring and even killing a percentage of protesters. It isn’t just a few bad apples. But wait, there’s more.
The guidance to police to only shoot people at greater than 36 yards and to bounce the bullet off the ground is absurd. Police are much more likely to need to use a ranged weapon within 36 yards than they are at greater than 36 yards, and bouncing a bullet off the ground and hitting a target would be extremely difficult as well as counter to the entire way the police have trained to use guns. I guarantee that the police, as a whole, are not taking that guidance seriously at all.
There are a couple of ways to explain this situation. Municipalities are almost all run by liberals. Either it is another case of liberal leaders pretending to solve a problem by merely introducing a narrative rather than actually doing anything (i.e., performative bullshit) or it is another case of liberal leaders being so intensely naive that they think making up a cute little rule solves this kind of systemic problem. In either case, liberals (Democrats) are participating in the abuse of American citizens by police officers by protecting the law enforcement apparatus from meaningful change.
