The poor, pointless Oblio...

The BBC loses its shit over London Metropolitan Police using modern defensive ammunition:

The Metropolitan Police is to issue all its firearms officers with the type of ammunition used to kill Jean Charles De Menezes.

Hollow point bullets flatten and widen on impact, causing maximum damage to vital organs.

De Menezes was falsely identified as a suicide bomber by a Metropolitan Police officer, who shot him seven times in the head. It takes a very special kind of person to think the type of ammunition mattered much in that situation. But moving on:

"How can the police in the UK use bullets that the Army is not allowed to use?"
...
Former US mayor Rudolph Giuliani faced sharp criticism when he tried to bring in the ammunition in New York in the 1990s.
...
David Dyson is a barrister and ballistics consultant.

Asked whether the rounds were unsurvivable, he said: "Yes. They don't use these bullets in the anticipation that people will survive.

"They expand, so you get the mushroom effect when the bullet hits the body.

"Much more energy is being imparted into the victim."

Oh, fucking unclench already. Hollow-point bullets were briefly controversial in the US, but are now universal in law enforcement (including the NYPD, which quickly realized that coddling people who don't understand the role of guns in defensive violence is less important a goal than preventing hails of stray fire when solid, jacketed 9mm bullets zip right through their targets), and would be universal in civilian use if they weren't so damned expensive. In those cases when deadly force is needed to stop a violent criminal right now, hollow-point bullets maximize the chances of quick incapacitation and minimize the chances of innocent casualties. It would be irresponsible of the Metropolitan police not to issue them.

Expanding ammunition is banned in warfare by the Hague Convention, because when you're shooting at a first-world soldier across a nineteenth-century battlefield, a clean bullet wound is generally sufficient to make him say "goodness, I'd best toddle off to the infirmary" and stop fighting. Protective violence in a civilian context, on the other hand, is close-up, fast moving, demands much more decisive resolution, and shouldn't generally involve the same indifference to how many people in the direction of fire are injured by a given bullet.

London Metropolitan Police, well done. BBC, shame on you. You're muckraking up some attention at the cost of more risk to innocent lives.