This past week, mass demonstrations have erupted across the US and other major cities around the globe.
These protests are calling out the systemic injustices carried out against black people, not least seen by the recent deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor.
They are also demanding an end to police brutality and the racism that is so deeply entrenched in America and the western world.
Watch - Police fire non-lethal projectiles at news crew live on air:However, over the past few days, a number of protests across the States have turned violent, and law enforcement officials have been caught on camera continuing to use the knee-to-neck technique, firing at news reporters, and using non-lethal projectiles - AKA rubber bullets - to disperse crowds.
Now, people have taken to social media to not only share the sheer size of these rubber bullets, but also highlight the true extent of the damage they can cause.
Here are just a few...
Adolfo Guzman-Lopez, a reporter for KPCC and LAist, says that he was hit in the throat by a rubber bullet after interviewing a man with his phone: Bryon Houlgrave, a photojournalist at the Des Moines Register shared his eye-watering bruise after allegedly being hit with a rubber projectile: And freelance photographer and author Linda Tirado has been left permanently blind in her left eye after police shot her in the face with one a rubber bullet in Nashville:In a series of tweets, Tirado says that the bullet "exploded [her] eyeball", adding: "My vision is gone no matter what it winds up looking like scar wise."
However, Tirado later urged people not to lose sight of the cause and urged people to focus on the real issue; that police are "violently repressing crowds who simply want to not be abused by the state because of their melanin levels".
She added: "A white lady losing an eye is not the injury we need to be focused on here. Put another way: they couldn’t have shot out my eye if they weren’t shooting at all. And the people they’re shooting at are folk protesting decades of violent white supremacy."
Rubber bullets are considered to be non-lethal methods of crowd control and are intended to be shot at the lower extremities or even at the ground so they bounce up and hit their target with a reduced velocity.
However, they are incredibly dangerous - potentially fatal - and as these tweets show, they are not just being fired below waist-height.
Earlier this week, a change.org petition was set up, calling for authorities to 'ban the use of inhumane rubber bullets'.
The petition states:
"Over the past week, there have been nationwide protests in the United States for the Black Lives Matter Movement, police brutality, and due to the tragic death of George Floyd in the hands of the Minneapolis police.
"There have been various occurrences where peaceful protesters have been shot with rubber bullets by the police, despite them doing nothing wrong to begin with. Multiple people have been majorly injured from these rubber bullets!
"Rubber bullets can be extremely lethal. They may cause bone fractures, injuries to internal organs, or even death. It’s been proven that rubber and plastic bullets are too dangerous for crowd control and have even been banned in various regions including Kosovo and Catalonia."
As of this writing, more than 616,000 people have signed the petition.
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