Bugbear tangent: technically, it’s not a passive voice construction.
The Passive Voice is a thing, where the normal object of a verb is made the subject, and the subject is either abstracted away, or moved out into an oblique case. So “I hit him” is put into the passive “He is hit”, and either the actor is dropped or has to be added back as “by me”.
In “gunfire unfolded”, this is an active voice. The subject is “gunfire”, the verb is “to unfold”. The passive voice would be "gunfire was unfolded*. Which makes it more clear what the point of it all is, and what we’re all upset about: the point is to eliminate agency. The gunfire just sort of happened, and it may or may not have been in the vicinity of British paras and peaceful protesters. The point is to hide the agency of the paras. In this case, putting it into the passive would just highlight what they’re doing.
No. Center the agency. Mention the victims. Stop pretending this shit “just sort of happens”.
“British paratroopers opened fire on protesters in Northern Ireland 50 years ago.”
