Students Pelted With Rubber Bullets By Police While Protesting At UC Riverside
The pepper spraying incident at UC Davis is still fresh in all of our minds yet police in California decided to one-up themselves at UC Riverside on Thursday, where students came out to protest a Board of Regents meeting.
Despite the fact that students were practicing non-violent peaceful demonstrations in protest of the plan to increase tuition costs at the school, which could double in four years, police officers decided it would be a great idea to shoot the protesting students with rubber bullets and paint-filled bullets in an attempt to disperse them from the grounds.
Some students managed to make their way into the meeting itself, and refused to be silent while the Board discussed it’s business agenda. As a result of the protests, the Board cut their meeting short and ran away to hide like cowards.
Afterwards, many protesters took pictures of their injuries and posted them through Twitter. Here’s a video of the protests and the brutality used by the police.
It’s pretty ridiculous that police felt the need to use rubber bullets or any other kind of projectile against peaceful students. You would think the police would save such strategies for prison riots or against armed and dangerous felons but apparently in California police are so bored with their jobs that they have to get their kicks by shooting at innocent people who have a Constitutional right to protest wherever and whenever they want.
9:52 pm
I want to know where the hell the engineering students are? Why don’t we have engineering students rigging up sonic amplification systems to bombard the police with focused sound waves? Why don’t we have engineering students hosing the police down with foam that hardens into a gluey shell, so that they can’t shoot, or even aim? Don’t the protesters have any friends in the science departments? They could set the sonic amplifiers to repeat the first amendment on a continual loop, then go out with bulletproof shields and put themselves between the berserk police and the protesters. This would be a real-world preparedness exercise for when they decide to protest the Koch brothers or the Federal Reserve, whose security staff don’t use fake bullets.
These are just a few suggestions–a dedicated team of physics, chemistry and mechanical engineering students should be able to come up with a host of options to keep police from harassing students exercising their right of free speech and assembly. From electromagnetic fields that scramble the cops’ minds or freeze up the actions of their weapons to psych campaigns that just make the cops WANT to go away, any self-respecting college should be able to mount dedicated defenses for any reasonable group of protestors.
And they might even be able to patent them, and get rich!!!
5:25 pm
That’s about as stupid an idea as I’ve read in a long time. “Next time”, somebody will see something and yell Gun!!, and the resulting bloodbath will make Kent State look like a couple of kids playing with Nerf guns.
“Wadda Maroon!!!” – Bugs Bunny
5:29 pm
Sorry, this was in reply to @Second Amendment Democrat, musta clicked the wrong button.
4:55 pm
@Christian Mock: “It’s like the pigs are actually TRYING to start an armed revolution…”
They ARE. What looks better on TV, cops shooting unarmed protestors or cops returning fire from an armed rebellion?
The GOP loves it, they own most of the companies that make the weapons and ammo, so a shooting war makes them money, makes us look bad and gains public support for the poor rich bastards.
There is no rational reason for cops to shoot unarmed protestors, so it has to be because they feel they can do so with no consequences. If a protestor hauled out a pistol he’d be dead before he got to take the safety off.
The proper backup defense has to come from a significant distance away, so it is obviously not the protestors’ doing, but someone a block or two away with a 50 cal liberated from Iraq… Don’t even have to actually hit any of the cops, just a half-dozen well-place rounds between the protestors and the police line will do the trick. Then pack up and get out of Dodge to fight another day before the goons locate you. The piggies in that city will be VERY careful next time.
And still nobody will have been actually shot.