 In 1993, 193 different countries convened in Geneva for the International Chemical Weapons Convention. And at this convention, they created the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, or OPCW, which became the official body tasked with implementing the changes agreed to by all of these countries, which later went into effect in 1997. Now one of the changes that they agreed to was to ban the use of tear gas during times of war, because this is a chemical weapon and using it would be too cruel. Although some of the countries who thought that it was a good idea to ban tear gas during times of war with other countries still wanted to maintain the right to use tear gas against their own citizens. And unsurprisingly, the United States is one of those countries. In fact, this week, the world watched in horror as Attorney General William Barr, whose duty, let me remind you, is to uphold the constitutional rights of American citizens, ordered chemical weapons to be used against peaceful protesters so Donald Trump could grab a quick photo op. Now every single American should be outraged at that site, because we're Americans. We are guaranteed the right to peacefully protest. It's guaranteed to us in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The peaceful protesters were gassed with chemical weapons all so the president could get a photo op. So they're using weapons that aren't even allowed in war, that are too cruel for wars against peaceful protesters for photo ops. I need you to understand how outrageous this is if you don't already see it. Now it's not just that they're gassing peaceful protesters to get crowds to disparage so the president can take photo ops. So in Charlotte, North Carolina, they literally blocked protesters with tear gas so they couldn't escape and had to breathe in the tear gas that was harmful to them. Take a look at this video. So they're not going to let us walk at our own pace and they're going to shoot pepper balls if we stop and people will run as it's already happening as you can see. Everybody trapped here, we're trapped, there's tear gas, we're trapped here, we're trapped, they're shooting pepper balls at us, they've thrown out tear gas, flashbangs, smoke, they just chased everybody down this way, there's a line of riot police up there, there's a line of riot police back there, we're trapped here, they're up top shooting at us. So what you just saw were peaceful protesters in the United States of America, no signs of looting or rioting, trapped and gassed with chemical weapons by the state that the US government doesn't even think we should use during times of war, completely unacceptable. But I've got another instance of abuse that I want to show you. In Philadelphia, protesters were trapped on the side of a highway blocked between two different police units and they were gassed by police with these chemical weapons that are too vicious for war and this video should shake everyone to their core. Did you hear their screams? Did you see how they literally had nowhere else to go? And they were forced to breathe in the chemical weapon, the tear gas, that the police had shot at them and yes, they were protesting peacefully. This isn't just using tear gas to get the crowds under control. That's not what's happening right now. As June, otherwise known as Shu An Head puts it, this is torture. This is literal torture. We are subjecting American citizens to this for exercising their first amendment rights. We are trapping them and using chemical weapons on them. Using chemical weapons so dangerous that the international community collectively agreed we shouldn't even use these weapons in war. But we have come to just accept that this is what's going to be used on protesters in America all the time. And the fact that we're so accustomed to it shows you that we've allowed the U.S. government to be tyrannical. We allow them to do this. We see tear gas and we just think, yeah, that's a thing that happens when there are crowds that get a little bit too rowdy, except no, that shouldn't happen because this is torture, it's cruel and unusual punishment. And I think you can actually make the case that this is a violation of the Eighth Amendment because if you're blocking people in and you're not allowing them to escape and they're literally screaming as you use a chemical weapon on them, I mean, I don't know what else to call that. Now what do the experts say? For this we go to Insider who reports experts say that tear gasing should be a weapon of absolute last resort, especially because it is so indiscriminate affecting everyone in an area where it spreads, including peaceful individuals and even police officers. I wouldn't go so far as to say there's absolutely no role for tear gas, especially in violent settings. Dr. Rohini Har, an emergency physician and crowd control weapons expert with physicians for human rights told Insider. But I would say that the level of widespread use, not just in the United States, but abroad and how frequently it is misused should give people pause. In 1993, tear gas was classified as a chemical weapon and in 1997, it was banned from use in international warfare, yet US police continue to use it legally against civilians. Dr. Dean Winslow, an infectious disease physician at Stanford Healthcare, who's been exposed to tear gas as part of his military training, told Insider it definitely is going to make people cough and sneeze, which puts crowds protesting in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic at even greater risk of infection. I would certainly discourage law enforcement from using those sorts of ride control techniques, he said. Har said that children, elderly people and others with chronic respiratory conditions can have an especially hard time breathing in tear gas. In addition, many black Americans disproportionately have pre-existing conditions like asthma that could make tear gas lethal. The United States is quick to criticize other nations for the use of tear gas on their protesters, Alicia Brooks, Chief Workplace Transformation Officer for the Southern Poverty Law Center, told Insider. Yet, we use it quite frequently. It's a dangerous chemical agent, regardless of what some people say that police officers or agencies would tell you that it's safe. Most of the time, it's really used to suppress protest, and that's really one of the fundamental problems with it. Jamil Daquard, director of the Human Rights Program with the American Civil Liberties Union, told the world in 2019. The most dangerous part of tear gas is often the package that it seeps out of. Tear gas canisters in our research are the ones that cause most of the permanent disabilities, Har said, especially when they hit the head or the neck, the eyes, the delicate bones of the face. Her case study of kinetic impact projectiles published in the BMJ in 2017 found that kips, including tear gas canisters, rubber bullets and beanbag rounds, have caused serious injury, disability and death. Of the 1,981 people who sustained injuries in the 26 studies used for the analysis, Har and her co-authors found 53 had died from their injuries, 71 sustained severe injuries, and 300 suffered permanent disabilities. It's not a humane way nor the proper way to disperse a crowd, Brooke said. I've never really seen tear gas work to de-escalate tensions or to make anything better, Har added. So that's what the experts say. First of all, it doesn't accomplish what people think it accomplishes. It doesn't actually do what police say it does. It doesn't disperse the crowds. They just run and they gather in a different area. And on top of that, if it's going to be used, it should be the absolute last resort. And we're talking the last resort to where there's a crowd of people brawling, literally fighting so much that they're killing each other, and tear gas is the only thing that will break them apart and possibly save their life before they take each other's life. That's the only instance, right? But that's not what we're seeing. What we're seeing is police forces across the country use this frequently. It's a common occurrence in the United States of America, and we've all become accustomed to it. When this is a serious form of tyranny, this is a chemical weapon that is being used against civilians that the US government won't even use against enemies at war. Do you understand why that doesn't make sense? Why we shouldn't allow this to happen? And the fact that I tell you this and you probably feel outraged in a sense of anger, but can't expect accountability, can't expect any of the police officers who have deployed tear gas to be held accountable or fired. You can't expect, you know, Attorney General to be impeached, or Donald Trump to be impeached because they use tear gas, shows you how tyrannical our government has become. They are torturing people. Now we saw the video, they're violating the Eighth Amendment, and we are not expecting them to face any consequences for their tyrannical actions. Violating the free speech rights, the First Amendment rights of peaceful protesters with chemical weapons, and nothing will probably come of it. Do you understand how serious this situation is? We have to acknowledge collectively as a society that this is cruel, it's oppressive, it's quite literally tyrannical. If you don't believe me, look up the definition of tyranny. That's what this is. But the fact that this continues to happen, this points to a trend of more and more of our constitutional rights slipping away from us. Conservatives are fear-mongering about us losing the Second Amendment. We're watching the First Amendment be decimated before our very eyes. And they're not saying a goddamn thing. We're violating the Eighth Amendment. We already violated it when we chose to indefinitely detain and torture human beings, but now we're doing that to American citizens. We already don't really have the Fourth Amendment, habeas corpus is being suspended. I don't think people truly grasp that when I say we're losing democracy and we're slipping into authoritarianism, this is not me being hyperbolic and alarmist. We're watching it happen right now. It is not acceptable for state actors, police forces to use chemical weapons against Americans, especially when they are peacefully protesting and exercising their First Amendment free speech rights and they're calling for civil rights as they're gassed. And we all just accept this. No. So why is it a war crime to use tear gas against other countries when we're at war with them, but it's not considered a war crime to use it against your own people? I think the answer is it is a war crime. If we saw a dictator gassing their citizens, we would speak out. I mean, think about how often Donald Trump and everyone else spoke out in favor of the Hong Kong protests and denounced the brutality of Hong Kong police officers. So why is it okay here? Why are we allowing this to happen? What little ability we have to protest and speak out, we have to exercise it to denounce these types of unnecessarily cruel uses of chemical weapons.