I’ve certainly seen a trend towards militarized uniforms by all sorts of petty regulators where I work. Increasingly black; cargo pants tucked into boots etc. It’s when you realize their job is to inspect taxi drivers or investigate minor boating accidents that it all looks particularly ludicrous.
Funny thing - our local council bucked the trend by moving their parking inspectors to a more casual (but still professional) looking uniform with no military-style boots or cargo pants. The result? Assaults on parking inspectors halved in the first year.
Bear in mind that the legal (IE semantic) model which differentiates police from military does not have to actually correspond to the reality one is attempting to model. For a different perspective, compare the two by way of an ethological analysis.
While I don’t doubt you’re an engineer, it’s pretty clear these pictures are the only experience you’ve had with ballistic masks. Unless maybe you play one of the games in the Payday series. I’ve handled a few(including models very similar if not identical to these), worn them around, so on, while doing reviews for a tacticool geardo…Sorry, tactical equipment enthusiast magazine which has since shuttered. So let me fill you in a bit, and address your concerns in order:
They do cut your peripheral vision to the sides a fair bit, but with a properly sized ballistic mask, the loss of regular vision is minimal. Put your hands flat, with the thumb-edge of your hand right about on the edge of your eye-socket, and then face them about 45-ish degrees outward - that’s about how much you lose.
I’m not quite sure how you breathe, but there’s little to no breathing impairment while wearing these masks. I’m not the fittest dude in the world, but I didn’t find it troublesome in the least, even after I’m breathing hard after a few sets of sprints.
3)They’re padded to fuck. You can even see that in these photos, if you take more than a cursory glance - Look how it’s standing off his face at the sides by about an inch, and how his eyes are about an inch back from the eye-hole edges. This also should be obvious, because it wasn’t designed by complete fucking morons. Of course it’s bloody padded, because in what mad fucking universe would someone design it without padding to stop the force from smashing your face like a sledgehammer blow?
Seriously, dude, you’re an engineer and you’re clearly not one who has much to do with ballistic protection.
So why do you think that this same thought that occurred to you, a layman(in designing this sort of protective equipment at least), wouldn’t occur to the engineers and designers whose jobs are to design protective equipment?
Umm, a bullet is not a bomb fragment. Notice how most suicide bombers are completely and utterly torn apart, but people shooting guns are not. That ought to tell you something about how much force is unleashed by a bomb as compared to a bullet. Remember, the force of a bullet can not be greater than the force of the firearm’s recoil, given that pesky consideration otherwise known as Newton’s third law. So given this, I kind of suspect that if you—as an engineer—actually ran your calculations on the force of a bullet and the area over which a facemask would spread it, you might find that these masks would be more effective than you suppose.
Yeah, well, when you’re facing the Taliban you ideally engage at long distance with lethal force. If you want riot police to take the same approach with “recalcitrant protesters” I’m sure they could do without the riot shields.
You mean the famous pepper spraying cop from UC Davis?
I have this feeling that a 7.62x54r round would blaze through any piece of that armor, and that’s just mid-level military weaponry.
I have seen those rounds do astonishing things and even if those masks were kevlar with layers of steel, sorry, you’re gettid a face full of lead.
Example: I have shot one of these rounds at a 2ft diameter stump and it went through the middle and kept on going after leaving the true. 2ft of wood. What they need are huge bags of sand all over their heads. A good foot of sand will stop or great de-lethalize a great many rounds. Sand, it is really your friend. Cinder blocks explode, wook explodes, walls spray stuff. Sand just silently sucks the lead in and doesn’t hardly move.
So it was better in the good ole days, when you would call in the National Guard instead of riot police? For all the hoopla over the pepper spraying at UC Davis, it’s a far, far cry from the Kent State shootings (where there was never any suspicion that any of the protesters had firearms) or use of attack dogs that were seen in the '60s.
FWIW, according to the source website this is a Taiwanese Army Airborne anti-terrorism unit. The fact that they’re military but not conventional battlefield military might explain some of the choices.
Those look like bullet-proof shields for barricade situations rather than riot shields. And just like a couple of broken ribs are better than a sucking chest wound, a bunch of broken facial bones are better than a bullet through your head. But right against the face armor is much less effective than armor that sits away from your face, although it is easier to see out of.
It’s UC Berkeley or just Cal. Sorry for the nit, but I hate seeing it misspelled. Also, wasn’t the original incident at UC Davis? UC Davis pepper spray incident - Wikipedia
