Comment by arminiusreturns
5 years ago
It's mostly because this isn't true, though lots of people love to wax on about what they think is prohibited by the Geneva Conventions. I've heard all kinds of stuff like this over the years, such as "you can't fire a 50 cal at a human" etc.
The Geneva Convention says nothing in particular about hollowpoints, so the verbiage has an "interpretation" by DoD about the Rules of Land Warfare that skirts around the issue . See https://www.justsecurity.org/25200/dod-law-war-manual-return...
I know this because I carried hollowpoints while deployed in an anti-terrorism capacity.
hollowpoint restrictions date back to the 19th century (hague convention), not the geneva convention. And yes that is addressing international war.
It explicitly prohibits frangible/flattening/expanding ammo in war. The US hasn't signed that, but in practice they adhere to that part of it (but yes exactly as you point out, only for "war" not "anti-terrorism")