Understanding Tear Gas

I know nothing about tear gas, except that I hope to never experience it. But, like many (I assume), I didn't think of it as all that terrible on the continuum of things a government might do to its citizens. Until now.

Now I wonder why I had the impression I had, because it's easy to see who that ignorance serves.

This is from Linda Tirado, author of Hand to Mouth: Living in Bootstrap America, who was replying on a thread about the tear-gassing of children at the border:

First, hi. I’m a marine’s wife and a conflict reporter. Let us very briefly review what tear gas actually is!

Firstly, I can tell you’re a civilian because you are confusing the kinds of gas used a hundred years ago with what we call “gas” now. Currently in the United States, federal/state/local law enforcement default to a few major suppliers for tear gas. I have a canister collection!

Anyway, tear gas isn’t a gas like nitrous oxide at the dentists’. It is a highly concentrated particulate. They made these innovations in weaponry because it was easier to control the weapon’s area of damage; actual gas blows away while tear gas hangs heavy in the air.

It’s important to note that there is CS gas and CX gas, which are essentially the 1.0 and 2.0 version. They added I think silicone to this last round to make it stick better! These weapons are designed specifically to create so much pain someone has to leave the affected area.

The first time I came up against CS gas, I was given no warning before the canisters were fired. First, I choked. I could not breathe. My throat rebelled against the irritant.

The second thing that I remember is being blind. I was convinced I had taken shrapnel to the face; I had heard the canister explode near my feet. I felt my face for blood and it was wet. Turns out all the mucus membranes in my head, eyes and nose and mouth, were watering.

So there I was, choking and thinking that I had just taken metal shards to the eyes, when the burning started.

Now, this chemical is very specially meant to stay on skin and clothing. It’s like an itty-bitty burr. It interacts with sweat and skin and gets rapidly more intense.

Have you ever seen a movie that featured napalm? It’s like that. Even the skin inside your clothes burns. Your genitalia burns, and for women it’s triply bad because of mucous membranes unless we were wearing thick long pants and were tightly belted.

You learn those things. Now I carry a spare belt and two oversized pair of underwear to make sure that if I get into a situation that is about to get “less than lethal” I don’t feel like I’m going into unaenesthetized labor.

But I remind you, this is the lesser of the common chemical agents used.

Now, CS sits in any cuts or open wounds you might have. It’s like salt if salt were ghost peppers. The reason it is the nicest of the chemicals is that CS disperses within a few hours.

CX, now. They jacked up the pain and it can stay in the area air for days. CX is basically what happened when our weapons developers looked at CS and thought “nah we can get another couple notches out of this” and so they did.

Fun fact: these gases are banned for use in war by the Geneva Conventions, but they are fully legal to use domestically. Which means that in the course of my reporting, I have endured weapons that my combat Marine never did while he was, you know, in combat.

SO those are the gases.

Let’s move on the the sprays! (Mind you, the sprays are worse.) So this is where people say “you could spray them on your food!” Because we’re talking about sprays that are capsaicin usually, which is like the most concentrated you can get a chili pepper.

So the sprays are developed to attack a very specific pain receptor. They’re much harder to get off your skin. Oh, and they can make you blind if you get shot full-blast.

So those are your “less-than-lethal” weapons.

We do not know what they do to childrens’ health.

What I do know is that there is never a moral reason to spray a child with a chemical agent that was designed specifically and only to cause the most intense and exquisite of pains.