Comment by 082349872349872

This comment is all sorts of wrong.

Military "bullets" (they're called rounds, actually) are designed to be optimized for performance in a warfare environment. That means accuracy, and range. A hollow point round is design to expand and be a stopping shot - with one round - and not continue to travel large distances, which puts other people at risk. Cops can carry those because if they're in a crowded environment firing a hollow point round at a threat means less risk to anyone else who isn't a threat.

>There are all sorts of international agreements on not using certain types of things in war - types of bullets are no exception.

Yeah no one will care about this once an actual near-peer war kicks off.

There's an argument for using hollow point bullets on sidearms in civilian environments. There's a lower probability of "over penetration". For a high power rifle in a military environment, such a thing is less of a concern.

Correct, hollow-point ammunition is prohibited by the Geneva Conventions. This has always baffled me since large caliber and high explosive munitions (120mm HEAT rounds from an Abrams) are regularly used against soft targets in combat, not to mention things like hellfire missles or JDAMs. That's the rules of war for you.

My understanding was that hollow point bullets allow the shooter to hurt someone without risking the lives of the people behind them. Not hurting “people just behind [your enemy]” is presumably less a concern in a war zone (than in a civilian setting) because they are presumed brothers in arms.

Did I understand that right?

>sense of the relationship between violent actions and their consequences

exactly. Whatever you use in warzone you're risking that the same can be used against you, thus all the conventions on warzone weapons usage and prisoner treatment. Thus all the training, so that your soldiers wouldn't cross [too frequently] the redline to trigger the response.

I remember reading for example that in WWI new young soldiers, i think in Russia, were sometimes issued old style non-flat 3-edged rifle attached combat knives. Whether the knife is flat or 3-edged wouldn't make any difference during the actual stabbing and the immediate time after that. Where it makes all the difference is outside of the immediate combat situation - those non-flat knives would make for unnecessary horrible very hard to heal wounds, and thus if you were found with such a knife on a battlefield you'd be killed right there instead of taken POW. So the older soldiers would make sure that the newbies would promptly lose the knives.

The situation is similar to hollow-point bullets - they create those horrible wounds without any tactical benefit on actual battlefield.

This isn’t very helpful which part would you like me to look at and how does that compare to actual rules of engagement in modern conflicts versus those used by the police?