Strange question nobody asks:
Who are these "black block" people?
At Frankfurt University during my "protest" phase (a man who isnt a socialist at 20 has no heart....), I knew pretty much everybody active in student politics on the left side and there were only about half a dozen people who fit into that category.
Where do you get 3000 of those? Hafenstrasse? Kreuzberg? Kreuzberg seems to be more the scene of Jihad than of anarchist violence lately.
Also it is strange that our internal intelligence services seem to do so little about these people. I mean they seem to have infiltrated the neo nazi scene quite well.
Strange about this demonstration was that the protesters I saw on videos seemed almost as well organised and uniformed as the police. You could really tell apart the violent ones from the peaceful ones just by looking at them before even the stones started flying.
Almost like an army.
Regarding shooting, shooting incidents are what turns protest into civil war. If somebody starts shooting, somebody is bound to shoot back eventually.
Politics aside, in a riot situation, I think the use of firearms is totally counterproductive, as the ranges are too close. Unless you use machineguns to mow everybody down (german police had MG 42s until about 1990), you cannot possible shoot them all and you might get rushed by the protesters, who might take guns from police officers and use them against the police. Until some new non lethal weaponry becomes available, tear gas, batons and watercannon are still the weapons of choice.
Also, do you really want to be the police officer who shoots first?
I know a police officer who once shot a guy in a self defense situation and nearly lost his job and his family over it.
And the fact that my government is not willing to gun down people at random for some vague concept as "respect for the law", even violent anarchist at will is the reason I think our constitution and government are worth supporting and worthy of Germany even though I disagree with many decisions the current government has made.
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