Tear gas, rubber bullets, flash-bang grenades, Tasers. So-called "less lethal" weapons have become a regular sight in the hands of police at protests around the world, from Hong Kong to Tehran to Washington, DC. Law enforcement and military experts describe these technologies as a humane crowd-control tactic, but they can still be incredibly destructive. Despite mounting injuries and even deaths attributed to these weapons, the companies that make them have been left pretty much to their own devices. The less-lethal industry, Wil Sands writes, "is to the armaments trade what dietary supplements are to the pharmaceutical industry: a supposedly more benign sector that is, in practice, largely unsupervised and often slipshod." Less-lethal weapons is a growing, multibillion-dollar business, and the United States is its top producer. In the Rust Belt of western Pennsylvania, Wil talks to former employees, who describe lax safety standards in the rush to keep up with demand. From there, he traces how these arms have wound up in the hands of security forces around the world, even those with a history of human rights violations, and how they've been used to put down demonstrations with devastating effect. He travels to Colombia, where dozens of protestors were blinded and a young man was killed during a general strike in 2021. And he shares his own encounter with less-lethal projectiles while covering Black Lives Matter protests in the US. —Caitlin Kelly | Features Editor |
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