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Life, Limb, Or Vision
I’ve spent the entirety of my adult life working for the United States Government. Sure, it was all with the military, although post 9/11, there has been a whole lot of sharing and swapping of capabilities going on. So, it’s not like I haven’t seen other government types in action. Once you get action guys out of and away from the Beltway, the opportunity to work with other government agencies is both rewarding and humbling. I wish the Great American Public writ large could see the sacrifices and risk accepted by all these guys to keep the Homeland, and our people, safe. Lost causes, forlorn hopes and knowledge that you’ll probably get bureaucratically cut off at the knees are the coin of the realm. You deal with it; it comes with the job.
But everywhere I’ve been, I’ve seen people go above and beyond innumerable times to help out a fallen brother. The extremes of risk your public servants are willing to assume when another USG official person is in danger of losing life, limb or vision is truly astounding: everything stops, everything becomes focused on getting the MEDEVAC in and the injured person out.
Same, too, with the Rules of Engagement. Whatever the political sensitivities of employing lethal force, whatever the shackles imposed/emplaced by our political masters, you pull the plug and go full dynamic and kinetic if that’s what you need to do to help a brother preserve life, limb or vision. The (usually the varmint in this scenario) Congressional staffer or political operative with 20/20 hindsight can go pound sand. There are all kind of unsung heroes, that put everything on the line to keep their fellow citizens safe.
Now, in our own cities, we have law enforcement officers combatting civil unrest, combatting the organized and purposeful violence that no citizen of a functioning Republic should suffer.
And those causing the unrest are blinding Law Enforcement Officers with lasers, perhaps permanently. I’m sure the Antifa or BLM kiddies that are shooting industrial lasers at law enforcement think it’s very cool. I’m sure they go home, after a night of riots, and snigger to each other that they have a hole card with their lasers.
Okay.
Kill them.
Put up snipers (and, really, we’re talking an urban environment in which a 200m shot would be considered “long-range,” so even marksmen would do), have optics on their scopes that would let them ID immediately the industrial strength lasers that are being used to blind honest cops, and shoot them dead. Keep eyes on the target once its down, and kill anyone that tries to recover the laser.
Good men have been blinded doing their best to keep Americans safe, blinded by personnel with malice and intent. Fine. You want to play for stakes encompassing life, limb or vision, you got it.
Kill these guys dead.
Published in General
Welcome back to the fight. It’s been a much longer time since any of those pension patriots (at the state and federal level) would assume risk such to protect a civilian, all the while denying those civilians the means to defend themselves.
One wonders if there’s a road-mobile junior version of the military lasers that are now able to fry drones and speed boats at a considerable distance. Turn about, with a bigger caliber, has always been fair play.
I was almost at one point going to comment on portable lasers of sufficient power to damage vision not being available, but cursory investigation has convinced me that they are.
Make them illegal. Now.
Make possession of them illegal. Now.
Sentence the possessors to any one of our Federal vacation spas in Leavenworth, Marion, Terre Haute. It doesn’t matter.
Make even the possession of a low-power laser illegal once a riot has been declared. If you children can’t play nice with your toys, you lose the toys and get sent to your room. I hear wifi connectivity really stinks in there too.
When it comes to snipers, take the shot. If you are a “peaceful protester” and fire a gun, nobody knows whether you are shooting blanks or are just a rotten shot. Lasers are no different.
There has got to be a money trail somewhere. Time to roll them up.
As Ricochet’s resident Laser Safety expert, let me weigh in:
Lasers are really hard to regulate. Lots of Class I lasers systems (like a laser printer or optical disk drive) can be dangerous with a bit of kit-bashing. People often buy what they believe is a Class IIIa or 3R laser (dangerous, but your blink response will protect you), like a laser pointer, and actually get a Class IIIB (always dangerous to eyes) or even Class IV (skin / fire hazard, even reflections are dangerous) laser due to bad manufacturing. A laser needs to be tested with an optical power meter to determine the hazard, and the calculations are complicated, especially for pulsed lasers.
I highly recommend the @bossmongo approach. I would be willing t take the shot, if need b.
If you are in a position to advise police on riot response, I strongly recommend a fog nozzle or fog machine. Non-irritating (people in hot cities will likely not mind a cool mist) and very likely to make lasers work like crap. It will also make beams visible, forming obvious signs pointing to bad actors
I had the safety training when I was starting to work on targeting systems. Classes 3B and 4, mainly. Those were too big to put in your pocket, and generally pulled enough juice to make battery power impractical. Even scattered Class 4 beams are dangerous to sight, which made the safety provisions kind of onerous.
Thanks. Didn’t know I was gone.
Not what I’ve seen, heard or experienced.
You’re just jaded because you live in the deep blue. Most the LEO guys I know and have worked with are all about 2A. As stated in the OP, it’s not til issues and decisions penetrate the I-495 Beltway that things get really jaded.
By the way @omegapaladin, you probably write laser safety classes. I only took one. So there’s that.
With you on the lasers, but don’t stop there. Commercial grade fireworks fall into the IED category. Shoot anyone who fires one. At the courthouse in Portland, they are cutting through barricades, smashing through doors and then attacking people inside. At what point do normal self-defense rules come into play for LEOs? Shoot anyone who crosses the threshold.
I’ve seen endless footage of cops being pelted with rocks, bricks and bottles. Start throwing those right back at them.
Start returning fire across the board. They say they want a revolution. Don’t let them LARP.
My job involves supporting the Directed Energy Directorate of the Air Force Research Laboratory. No one is going to sign off on using lasers on people. There is something AFRL developed ten years ago that has never been used beyond a test range, Active Denial. It’s a microwave system that heats the moisture just below the skin’s surface and causes a person to want to flee the area. It was developed as a non-lethal method of crowd control.
The story I was told was that the commander in Afghanistan around ten years ago was sold on the device and it was shipped to Afghanistan. By the time everything was worked out and shipped off, the commander had changed and the new guy couldn’t be sold on it. It sat in a warehouse for a while and then shipped back to the states.
Agree with not messing around with the guys using lasers. It’s not fun and games and should be responded to appropriately.
Comment #1
Typical Eeyore snark
I’ve been wondering about this laser-blinding stuff, and how to deal with it. Boss, you’re really thinking outside the box! Oh, look, some of these .338 Lapua rounds are already outside the box!
Comment #2
A little more serious
When I was looking for pics for my previous snark comment, I was searching info on urban sniper rounds. One of the first links I found, however, was to a sobering article on the multitudinous issues involved in urban sniping. Not only caliber, but other practical, emotional and legal issues involved in the sniper trade. Of course they are the same issues that must engage anyone who might consider launching a potentially lethal projectile downrange, but reading it with Boss’s argument in mind, I got a pretty good dose of O..M..G..
The article was from a site called Swat Concepts, and was titled The Modern Urban Sniper. It dealt exclusively with various single Bad Guy scenarios, and the huge number of concerns with which the sniper must deal. When I applied it to the dynamically fluid, ever-changing rioters-mixed-with-protesters we see more and more every day, the choice and challenge offered by Lt. Col. Mongo, which I think is MUY SOLID, makes me appreciate, for the zillionth time, the discipline, determination, and tungsten cojones of those whose job is to effectively and morally press that trigger.
They make laser diodes that can produce invisible Class IV lasers, and they are around the size of a tissue box with the power supply and cooling fans. Batteries would be a problem. I’ve heard that some of the more dangerous lasers are mil-surplus rangefinders and designators. NdYAG lasers have at least some invisible emission, but that is still within the range of light focused on the retina. NdYAG and TiSapphire are the lasers that cause the most accidents.
You are pretty much dead on otherwise – thank you for paying attention in laser safety class.
I don’t want to criminalize lasers on 2nd amendment grounds. That said, I’ve got absolutely no problems with the Boss Mongo sniper solution if people are using the lasers on people.
I found the picture of the warning outside one of the labs at work I’d taken.
Strongly disagree. There are many non-violent uses of lasers. Like the lasers in a DVD/Bluray player, which are easily powerful enough blind. Do you want a violent weapon permitting system for DVD players?
Don’t ban the tool. Prosecute the violent users.
Edit: @percival prompted (irritated) me to reply without scrolling through the rest of the comments. @omegapaladin did it better.
Eh. I try to keep my comments brief, and sometimes that is at the expense of clarity and comprehensiveness. The lower level power units are and should be available. Once you get to Class 3M, things are getting dangerous. Note that staring into a laser beam of any power is bad. If I recall correctly, your blink reflex should protect you against Class 3M.
It is cute to hear the media say things like “protestors” and “mostly peaceful,” but when people’s lives and health are being attacked by thugs then the threat needs to be removed quickly and severely.
For this thing to be as organized and to last as long as it has I suspect government money somewhere feeding this.
The one physics experiment I did back in my college days used a glorified laser pointer. They told me I needed a sign. I put one up that just said “Warning! Lasers!” with a picture of a stormtrooper on it.
I had totally been thinking about that. I live on an approach to an airport and every so often we get some idiot shining a laser at a cockpit.
If someone “shoots” a law enforcement officer with a laser then they should be able to return fire.
I like the fog idea. Misting up the area means that anyone who shines a laser at a cop just drew a nice straight line to himself. Easier for a sniper than looking for muzzle flash. Whack-a-mole with 308 Blackout sounds about right.
Israel is reportedly doing efffective work with .22 LR in urban riot/insurrection settings.
A lot of the ones in deep blue aren’t. The upper echelons certainly aren’t, and they seem to hire and train accordingly. In 2017 there were fewer than 100,000 CCW permits issued in California. For a population over 39 million. It’s up to the county sheriffs to set policy. Many rural county sheriffs make their counties “shall issue” but the SF Bay Area and the LA/San Diego metro areas are highly restrictive. Except for heavy contributers to their campaigns, high ranking Democrat pols, and people like that.
Voting Biden means not only do you not want them shot, you want this to continue.
Anyone supporting Democrats supports wand wants these outcomes. Since that is all the elites, nothing will happen.
Lasers are not more dangerous than guns. They should both be legal and only lightly regulated. Abusers can be punished.
Essentially, any violent aggression should be violently defended against. By tolerating deliberately dangerous projectiles, firebombs, lasers, and such, government communicates to insurgents that it is weak and vulnerable. It prolongs and compounds the danger. Any aggressor tolerated in hope of later isolated arrest remains a threat until that arrest.
As stated previously, the situations in Portland, Minneapolis, and other big American cities reminds me of the scene in The Godfather when Michael Corleone realizes the insurgents could win because they are willing to risk everything, to go further than the loyalists. We see that today. Government is holding back and loyalists are waiting on government to do its duty.
Big cities are the seats of political power. It doesn’t matter if most of America geographically is sensible while our government refuses to defend itself. That’s how relatively small insurgencies like the Bolsheviks seized power in past coups. And in modern America the radical Left is backed by the leadership of most major industries, most schools, most news agencies, etc.
There is a very real possibility of violent revolution in America today. The longer that cities — the seats of power — wait to crush the insurgency, the more dangerous that insurgency becomes.
Black Lives Matter and similar Marxist groups have received billions in funding and a wealth of advertising recently. This could become a bigger problem very quickly — especially while much of America is “locked down”, fearful of looming economic disaster, and fed horror stories about a Trump dictatorship. And many think Biden is senile, in which case Democrats are proposing a pawn for President with the real powers hidden.
2020 can still get much worse.
If you are going to do this, do it the Israeli way: They have lots more experience with this sort of thing than we do.
A .22 can administer a whopping dose of disapproval, fatal or not. Also, any of the 30 cal stuff is going to go through the target and possibly take out some (relatively) innocent “protester.”
And seeing one or two of their comrades drop is likely to have a calming effect on the rest of the mob (I know it would on me).
I don’t think you’d have to snipe more than a couple of mobs before protests all over the country got a whole lot more peaceful.
https://www.wweek.com/news/courts/2020/07/25/federal-police-buy-1000-pairs-of-sunglasses-to-protect-officers-from-protesters-lasers/
In a spontaneous or first-time mob, there might be innocent protestors mixed in who get swept up in mob psychology. But after repeated incidents of mob violence in the same city, everyone knows what they are joining when he or she enters that crowd. If one is deliberately providing cover for violence like projectiles, that person is enabling violence.
The “shield wall” protestors should be forcibly removed or incapacitated. If they are hit by stray fire, they invited that possibility.
When I was younger the only way you could get a CCW was to be a Democrat donor, have a good reason and a friendly Sheriff. (preferably one you gave money too)