5 ms·

Whoever was shooting lived through this once in real-time. Everyone else gets to view it again and again, stop the action, if they please, back up...

EliRivers 17y ago
Isn't that true of everything ever recorded? What point are you making?
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- Dellort 17y ago
  Well that's not true unless you publish the recording in some way so that everyone has a chance to watch it.
- etherael 17y ago
  I think the point he's probably making is it's a lot easier for us sitting here in front of our computers with no risk to our person watching a video edited and subtitled with helpful descriptions of exactly what's happening after the fact than it is for a pair of soldiers strapped into a piece of military hardware hovering over an active warzone with immediate risk to their lives in the event that they're engaged by enemy forces armed with RPG's.
  - EliRivers 17y ago
    It is easy for us, yes, but the topic at hand isn't how easy it is for us to watch footage. How easy it is for us to dissect it has no bearing whatsoever on the events themselves. Put another way, how difficult does it have to be for us to see what happened before it's acceptable for us to disagree with the actions taken? Edit: This is a fantastically unpopular comment! Is it my lack of respect for the "Thou shalt not Monday-morning quarterback, no matter how badly the quarterback screwed it up" commandment? :)
- sliverstorm 17y ago
  he means it's easy to analyze and criticisze from our safe little chairs.
  - shadowfox 17y ago
    I wonder how things would be if we did not comment at all
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
colinplamondon 17y ago
Watching this in a YouTube video is gut-wrenching after the introduction, knowing what's going on ahead of time - I still feel sick five minutes later. But at the time? There was the man crouching against the corner of the house, looking like he could possibly have an RPG to blow the shooter out of the sky. The guy doing the shooting was trigger happy, but murder is probably too strong for this. Clearly this is a fucked up example of what happens in the midst of urban warfare, but more than that is going beyond the context of the video. After the shooting, a black van runs up to collect bodies and help the wounded, in a very organized fashion--- it doesn't seem unreasonable that they thought that they were dealing with a team radio'd by insurgents. I think the bigger problem here is that you have a godlike helicopter raining death on people below, with no on the ground intelligence. Why doesn't the helicopter have the ability to shoot non-lethal rounds in this kind of situation? Why can't they communicate with the man crawling after the shooting? If we can fly UAVs from Vegas, why can't we fucking drop a remote ground vehicle to deal with grey area situations without killing eight people? This seems like a disgusting failure of capabilities more than malicious murder.
- sliverstorm 17y ago
  > Why doesn't the helicopter have the ability to shoot non-lethal rounds in this kind of situation? Even if it did, I'm pretty sure the lethal kind are called for when you see an RPG pointed at you. We know it wasn't one now, but if it had been me in that helicopter? I doubt I would have chosen non-lethal.
- krschultz 17y ago
  I agree with a lot of your points - except there is no such thing as a non-lethal round fired from a helicopter. Any material you shoot at people at that velocity will kill them, and the velocity you need to make it non-lethal would be too low for any accuracy from that height. I did some work on non-lethal rounds and they need to be fired from an underpowered shotgun or grenade launcher to be slow enough not to kill people. What really would help is better cameras. If the gunner had better resolution and zoom, he would have clearly seen it wasn't an RPG. If we give these guys the power to be judge, jury, and executioner, we also need to give them the senses to make an informed decision. That technology is possible and just like uparmored HUMVEES for whatever reason it is not available to these guys and innocent people died because of it. But hey, lets go back to the broader generalizing on the state of US society and the blood-thirstyness of its troops because after all, it is the internet.

EliRivers 17y ago

Isn't that true of everything ever recorded? What point are you making?

deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
Dellort 17y ago
Well that's not true unless you publish the recording in some way so that everyone has a chance to watch it.
etherael 17y ago
I think the point he's probably making is it's a lot easier for us sitting here in front of our computers with no risk to our person watching a video edited and subtitled with helpful descriptions of exactly what's happening after the fact than it is for a pair of soldiers strapped into a piece of military hardware hovering over an active warzone with immediate risk to their lives in the event that they're engaged by enemy forces armed with RPG's.
- EliRivers 17y ago
  It is easy for us, yes, but the topic at hand isn't how easy it is for us to watch footage. How easy it is for us to dissect it has no bearing whatsoever on the events themselves. Put another way, how difficult does it have to be for us to see what happened before it's acceptable for us to disagree with the actions taken? Edit: This is a fantastically unpopular comment! Is it my lack of respect for the "Thou shalt not Monday-morning quarterback, no matter how badly the quarterback screwed it up" commandment? :)
sliverstorm 17y ago
he means it's easy to analyze and criticisze from our safe little chairs.
- shadowfox 17y ago
  I wonder how things would be if we did not comment at all
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]

colinplamondon 17y ago

Watching this in a YouTube video is gut-wrenching after the introduction, knowing what's going on ahead of time - I still feel sick five minutes later. But at the time? There was the man crouching against the corner of the house, looking like he could possibly have an RPG to blow the shooter out of the sky. The guy doing the shooting was trigger happy, but murder is probably too strong for this. Clearly this is a fucked up example of what happens in the midst of urban warfare, but more than that is going beyond the context of the video. After the shooting, a black van runs up to collect bodies and help the wounded, in a very organized fashion--- it doesn't seem unreasonable that they thought that they were dealing with a team radio'd by insurgents. I think the bigger problem here is that you have a godlike helicopter raining death on people below, with no on the ground intelligence. Why doesn't the helicopter have the ability to shoot non-lethal rounds in this kind of situation? Why can't they communicate with the man crawling after the shooting? If we can fly UAVs from Vegas, why can't we fucking drop a remote ground vehicle to deal with grey area situations without killing eight people? This seems like a disgusting failure of capabilities more than malicious murder.

sliverstorm 17y ago
> Why doesn't the helicopter have the ability to shoot non-lethal rounds in this kind of situation? Even if it did, I'm pretty sure the lethal kind are called for when you see an RPG pointed at you. We know it wasn't one now, but if it had been me in that helicopter? I doubt I would have chosen non-lethal.
krschultz 17y ago
I agree with a lot of your points - except there is no such thing as a non-lethal round fired from a helicopter. Any material you shoot at people at that velocity will kill them, and the velocity you need to make it non-lethal would be too low for any accuracy from that height. I did some work on non-lethal rounds and they need to be fired from an underpowered shotgun or grenade launcher to be slow enough not to kill people. What really would help is better cameras. If the gunner had better resolution and zoom, he would have clearly seen it wasn't an RPG. If we give these guys the power to be judge, jury, and executioner, we also need to give them the senses to make an informed decision. That technology is possible and just like uparmored HUMVEES for whatever reason it is not available to these guys and innocent people died because of it. But hey, lets go back to the broader generalizing on the state of US society and the blood-thirstyness of its troops because after all, it is the internet.