My two cents: In general, shouldn't our elected "leaders" arrange to meet with protesters, people who are obviously very frustrated, and spend the time to talk to them, instead of sending in the police to gas them?
Because the article is about the why of militaries, and in case you didn’t read it, the article explicitly calls out the use of tear gas by police etc. as chemical weapon use, but as being orthogonal to the point they wanted to discuss.
Ah, here's the part of the article you are referring to:
> Now, I want to leave aside, for the purpose of this essay, the use of lethal chemical agents in genocide, the use of non-lethal chemical agents entirely, as well as the use of things like defoliants that were not intended to cause casualties (even if they did). Those things are all important, but if we get into talking about them, we will never get anywhere.
I read up to that part, where he asserted that chemical weapons don't work well militarily (which I understand). But afterwards he appeared to explain this in great detail, and I tailed off, switched to skimming (seemed to already make sense to me, and it was a long article). I did miss the part above, where he left police use out of scope for his article.
But isn't it worth a thread or two here? Maybe from a couple different angles, now that I think more about it - effectiveness, harm, correlation with other things, alternatives, are there countries that don't do this, etc. I didn't see anything yet when I posted my comment above. Maybe too off topic?
Legal for police use but banned in warfare. I agree with your point though.
> The 1925 Geneva Protocol categorized tear gas as a chemical warfare agent and banned its use in war shortly after World War I.
> In 1993, nations could begin signing the U.N.'s Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC) that outlawed the use of riot control agents in warfare.
> A database by the International Committee of the Red Cross shows the ban of riot control agents in war went into effect in 1997, but still made it legal for law enforcement use. The Senate approved the CWC in a 74-26 vote on April 25, 1997