It's a legal gray area in Serbia where the use against civilians isn't explicitly forbidden, so they're playing fast and loose and moving fast to crush opposition. It's better than troops just gunning people down, but for a modern, supposedly civilized country it's horrible to see.
The people in power are the type of people that use their power in these ways. The US shouldn't be supplying them. We're not the world police, we don't need to enforce global norms, and we shouldn't be selling hyperoffensive mass crowd control technology. They should be limited to Temu LRAD, or their LRAD at home; we shouldn't be providing them S-Tier dystopian authoritarian kits for DIY oppression.
The people that profited off of this are a special kind of evil. We shouldn't be outfitting dictators, gangsters, or warlords.
But, greed is good. The dollar is king. This is what happens when incentives and principles don't align.
> It's better than troops just gunning people down
Except you're far more likely to use it.
This is why cops don't shoot to "injure" instead of kill (also, it's hard enough for them to hit center of mass in a tense situation; there's no way they hit a leg.) It's lethal force. Which means that for its use to be legal, that person has to die because they are an imminent lethal threat to others. If injury is sufficient to resolve a situation, they weren't an imminent lethal threat.
Tasers started out as a way to temporarily incapacitate someone so you didn't have to shoot them. Now they're being used as compliance and corporal punishment devices.
Lots of videos out there of cops ordering people to do something while shocking them with something that makes their entire body lock up and is extremely painful.
They know the person can't do what they want them to. "Stop resisting!" while tasering someone is the cop version of "stop hitting yourself!"
During the BLM protests US police realized that they could do serious injury with "nonlethal" rubber bullets. Several people lost eyes including a journalist.
Police also regularly use tear gas against US citizens. These are weapons that would violate the Geneva convention, but we're okay with them to disperse a crowd.
They have been used against US citizens in the United States? That is news to me.
If they have been used in other countries against US diplomatic corps that is an act of war.
Now if a US citizen uses a visit to a foreign country to protest against a government they’re on their own. I’m sorry, but US citizens shouldn’t be engaging in that and the US state department has no obligation to protect that condition.
I went hiking in Honolulu once with this woman who worked for the US gov I met on tinder. We went through this bamboo grove behind the city. All of sudden there was this overwhelming tiredness that took me over and I had to sleep. I needed to sit down by a rock and fell asleep very quickly. Then I woke up really quickly but it seemed like avea have passed. It was crazy. I was super healthy back then and don't have any issues or take any medicines. It was crazy, let me tell you, that woman was very precise but very strange.
FWIW there was some nice MILsurp LRAD kit on eBay a few years back. Looked like there was some corrosion but repairable, possibly functional in its current state. Wasn’t the truck sized one, but big enough (about 1m emitter) to do what is seen in the video. Sold for around 3000 iirc lol. I don’t think anyone knew what it was or it would have sold for a lot more. The seller had no idea, or at least wasn’t letting on if he did.
So, it’s not like LRAD is controlled like SAMs or something. Also, pretty trivial to build. Idk what the IP looks like on it , but back of the napkin you can build a 1kw unit for around $7000 buying the parts at retail. The expensive bits are the transducers. Everything else is a few mosfets and MCU/software.
The opposition protesting here is 1/5 of the population of the country . Its basically all people.
Like 1 million protesting in a country of 5 million , is all voters between 18- 59. Russia is loosing , the rot of oligarchy is dissolving.
Assuming average age distribution between 16 to 60 in the protesters, that leaves about 3 million non protesters in the same age distribution for serbia, with children and elderly making up the remaining population, which is around 6.7 million, give or take.
That's 1 out of 4 working age citizens hitting the streets - not all people, but a huge chunk. It's safe to say there are going to be a lot of sympathizers in the non-protesters, a lot of people who wanted to protest but couldn't. There are definitely those who support the government, but I'd wager they're less than 15% of the total population, with the rest in opposition, or at least not in support of the government.
The usual tipping point for revolution is lower - if 10-12% hits the streets, it's a strong signal that the movement behind that activity is taking power.
It is impossible for Russia to "lose" in Serbia. The vast majority of Serbs support Russia, and are pissed at their government for not supporting it enough.
If you were at a protest that was starting to get a bit rowdy and somebody used one of these on you, what would you do? I'd either come back prepared for actual violence, or switch from protest to sabotage.
It's a weapon meant to deny the use of an area by threatening non-selective permanent physical damage. There are very few legitimate civil use cases for something like that.
It's the most important time in human history to protest/fight unchecked power because it's likely the last era of humanity that we are going to be able to.
We are getting to the point where the technology that fuels oppression, including extremely pervasive surveillance, privatized intelligence services with no oversight, scalable AI agents that do as they are told, and crowd "maiming" or other forceful dispersal techniques are growing past the ability to resist them.
Wars historically happened under conditions where people died but the planet was largely left in tact, but we now have 3 countries with the ability to erase entire cities or make the world functionally uninhabitable by humans, which absolutely changes the calculus of war. If you do not have nukes your sovereignty is questionable.
Likewise if the tools to put down crowds, find saboteurs, and weed out dissent is perfected, meaningful dissent can only be expressed through withdrawal and there is no final check on abuses of power where any, instead of some, of the "checkers" of power are left in tact. Anti-dissent technology has the potential for a nuclear moment that fundamentally changes the calculus of protest and I think AI is very much potentially that.
Was expressing this fear to my wife and kids the other day. Ubiquitous cameras everywhere (like in the UK for many years) and other surveillance technology has always been a concern but had scaling limits -- but when you combine it now with the cheap ease of machine learning technologies we have a serious problem.
And then consider drones, mobile devices. And then mass disinformation and/or disruption via LLMs.
As a long time advocate of old school mass action, and a believe in active protest movements as part of a healthy democracy, I have a strong feeling of unease. I've had it since about 9/11, but it's now really bad.
e.g. if you know, with certainty, that heading out to a protest could lead to your instant termination from your job because a drone passed over and took a photo and identified all 100,000 people in the crowd instantly.. would you still go?
Or if having been identified, some malevolent actor could just turn around and mass produce fake content from you and others in the crowd, to discredit you?
AI also has the potential to detect your every unique tic in a way that humans would be incapable of doing. You could be masked but your gait and other body movements will give you away, or at least place you in a statistically likely pool of suspects.
"Walk without rhythm and it won't attract the worm."
> e.g. if you know, with certainty, that heading out to a protest could lead to your instant termination from your job because a drone passed over and took a photo and identified all 100,000 people in the crowd instantly.. would you still go
The funny thing is that most people see this as a feature rather than a bug. Before the 2024 election the policies of most surveillance platforms roughly matched the culture of upper-middle-class Californians, so the argument was "if abusive technology is used to shut down opinions I don't like, I don't see a problem with that". Good luck explaining why such an attitude is a problem.
> we now have 3 countries with the ability to erase entire cities or make the world functionally uninhabitable by humans
If we're talking the Russia, the US and China then they certainly have the largest arsenals, but there's an order of magnitude difference between the stockpiles of the first two and the third. China doesn't have that many more nukes than France, and only has about double the number of warheads of the UK (though it is questionable how independent from the US the UK's capability is).
And then there's Pakistan, India, Israel and North Korea.
from: Nuclear Notebook, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
~ Hans M. Kristensen, Matt Korda, Eliana Johns, Mackenzie Knight | March 12, 2025
The modernization of China’s nuclear arsenal has both accelerated and expanded in recent years.
In this issue of the Nuclear Notebook, we estimate that China now possesses approximately 600 nuclear warheads, with more in production to arm future delivery systems.
China is believed to have the fastest-growing nuclear arsenal among the nine nuclear-armed states; it is the only Party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons that is significantly increasing its nuclear arsenal.
Also, the threshold laid out above was "erase an entire city" OR "make planet unihabitable".
Any nation or group with a first gen atomic weapon can erase a city .. exercising that ability can potentially lead to a greater nuclear exchange between others, particularly if it's unclear what happened and what might be about to happen.
I think this is the last chance for the people in power to stop messing around before US, the people with knowledge, get pissed off and take them down with force, using the technology WE make for THEM.
They already know words are meaningless and don't count for anything. Democrats have been trying to use words to get their way or even compromise and republicans fully understand they don't have to pay attention to them at all. Threats are laughable. If democrats had any power they would have used it. Their inaction is proof of their impotence.
Words don't matter, only actions matter. "upvotes don't count."
A street presence can barely be mustered.
Also if you start learning about history, you'll learn that "intellectuals" are the first people totalitarians crack down in precisely because of this threat you just made. So by the time you realize you need to make good on your threat, chances are it will be too late. Don't read about the Khmer Rouge killing fields or the Indonesian "communist" purge if you want to have a good day. American exceptionalism is fueling a "can't happen here" attitude that's fueling people's denial about our many potential futures. Inaction means that we aren't influencing what that future is. We are at someone else's whims. History doesn't tell you what will happen, but it tells you what can happen.
You're saying right now you're speaking softly, but carrying a big stick, so they better listen. I don't think you're carrying one, and the republicans purging the old guard and replacing them with loyalists don't think you are either. You're just speaking softly. We all seem to be.
> we now have 3 countries with the ability to erase entire cities or make the world functionally uninhabitable by humans
Nuclear war is horrible enough without requiring hyperbole. Each of the U.S., Russia and China have the ability to functionally end industrial civlisation as we know it. None has the power to make the Earth uninhabitable by humans (outside hypothetical asteroid redirect capabilities).
Admiral Rickover, the father of the American nuclear navy, testified to congress that he thought we would probably destroy ourselves and hardly anyone is more expert than he was.
Senator PROXMIRE. What do you think is the prospect,
then, of nuclear war?
Admiral RICKOVER. I think we will probably destroy
ourselves. So what difference will it make? Some new
species will arise eventually; it might be wiser
than we are.
And the fact that authoritarianism is on the rise everywhere means the ruling oligarchs KNOW it.
The silicon valley elite are practically going insane over the prospect of total authoritarian control of the "lessers" ... of course couched in pure libertarian nonsense about unrestained freedom of the ultrarich to do as they please to them.
One thing is for sure. These technologies don't make protest or revolution any easier. They give asymmetric power to whoever wields them (the state) against whoever doesn't (a loose collection of angry people on the street without the same tools).
This isn't the 1800s anymore where the most powerful tool was a gun, and you could distribute these symmetrically across state and people to keep the state in check.
Surveillance, crowd control weapons, access to banking, control over media, eventually AI and widespread robotics, have properties that empower the state. In the context of mass protest, the status quo gets harder and harder to dislodge.
None of this matters much while democracy is still existing, but it's a risk that's there. It makes the fall of democracy more of an absorbing state that you can't escape from.
That is a pretty disingenuous quotation, you cut it mid sentence destroying the context:
> It's the most important time in human history to protest/fight unchecked power because it's likely the last era of humanity that we are going to be able to.
Close friend who was on the spot described it as car or plane running towards you, you don't only hear it, you also feel vibrations in the body creating panic and fear.
All demonstrations of LRAD I heard on youtube were with high pitched sound, not a "whoosh" as witnesses experienced last night in Belgrade. Can these devices play any kind of sound?
What is described by victims, and what can be heard on some recordings from last nights, sounds more like Vortex Cannon:
I’m moderately suspicious of the details some people/articles say. Long story short, there’s 1-4khz audio weapons (LRAD), and microwave/heat based ADS. It appears that both of these were used, a Reddit army vet commented about how that’s apparently the “protocol” as the ADS is strong enough to pick off the last stragglers.
I’m ever so slightly suspicious of the “low frequency sound weapon” aspect because that typically takes a lot of energy (I’m speaking from an audio background). However the reports of feeling uneasy do match that of infrasound… yet typically (based on what I’ve read) infrasound doesn’t have an instant reaction but takes some time for people to feel it.
Even without knowing the background of those protests: It is heartbreaking to see a crowd of peaceful people (seemingly during a moment of silence) being attacked by their own country and fleeing in panic and pain.
Please take into account that this occurred during the fifteen-minute silence observed by the protesters in memory of the fifteen victims of the accident, which the protesters blame on the government corruption and which was the very reason for the start of the protests.
I've seen some theories that it was actually an ADS (basically a low-power microwave beam, immensely painful but tuned to be just under the threshold to actually cause visible burns), since there haven't been any reported cases of permanent deafness yet.
The student organizers in the crowd did an incredible job clearing people out of there before the police could escalate further and cause more mob-crowding panic deaths.
Once an organization actually attacks you, it's very easy to decide that any legitimacy they view themselves as having is irrelevant and to come back next Monday with mortars and machine guns.
Reminds me of the escalation seen in the Ukrainian Maidan, went from some heavy handed policing to non-lethal rounds (eg: teargas / beanbags) to BBs to snipers and live firing on crowds.
Yes, but polarization is a possibility. You can't know you're the majority, so until violence is used against you, you don't necessarily have a reason to turn the thing into a civil war.
> come back next Monday with mortars and machine guns
Where the heck are they going to get those in Serbia? Weren't they rounded up after the war, especially mortars?
Also that sort of thing tends not to last very long against the regular army, who have a much larger supply of materiel and are better trained. It only really works if the army flips politically against the regime (think Ceaucescu, or less violently the Carnation Revolution).
There's a huge amount of weapons hidden away in attics, even after several campaigns to get rid of illegal weapons, no questions asked. There's also a huge amount of it in the region (Montenegro, Bosnia). I used to live first in Serbia, then Montenegro.
I've personally been to weddings in both Serbia and Montenegro, in the early-mid 2000s, where they fired full auto weapons with live rounds into the air. AK variants and such. I remember us kids collecting shell casings and stripper clips.
I'd say that it's mostly handguns and hand grenades, some AK and SKS variants, obsolete 40s-50s SMGs given out to territorial defense decades ago, some bolt action rifles and some Zoljas (anti tank rocket) and AP mines from the war.
I remember a guy in Podgorica, Montenegro (local football hooligan and drug dealer) firing a Zolja at a department store at night. He had obtained it for 200 euros in Belgrade, Serbia and "had to try it out". [1]
I also remember them catching a 15 year old with an AK in 2017 in Podgorica, Montenegro. [2]
I loved frequenting the local flea market and you could regularly see stuff like helmets for sale, also some magazines (I remember seeing one for an MP40 or similar SMG). I also witnessed a transaction, a guy buying a small pistol from another guy at the flea market. The gun quickly changed hands and dissapeared in his jacket, but I saw it beyond doubt.
Anything else I could write would just bring into question my credibility, so I'll keep these stories for us who lived through it. It recently happened to me that I started quesioning my childhood memories (age 8 or so), like "did that really happen or did I imagine it", so I asked people I remembered were there with me, and yep it sure as hell did. I even forgot some details and people involved. But I'd have a hard time beleiving it if I heard it.
Also bear in mind that a lot of the people who have these weapons actually support the government and loved Vučić's old party from the 90s. For example, one of the people firing an AK at his son's wedding was a policeman, and his grandson is now a policeman and Vučić sympathiser in Belgrade.
you are stating this with confidence but it doesn't sound at all convincing - where are you getting this from?
aggressive crowd control measures have been used very often and they almost never result in an armed rebellion. that's just nonsense. There are many MANY levels of escalation left for both sides - as well as the real expectation of behind the scenes diplomacy and within-the-system politics.
like really, are you just fantasizing about a balkan civil war because it's exciting? or are you trying to get more people to think that civil disagreement may as well be considered warfare? just what are you on about, mate?
This strikes at the core of the idea of solidarity.
If you see injustice but do nothing, you invite the same injustice on yourself.
Injustice at it's core is an arbitrary execution of power, so suffering injustice anywhere is to let power stay unchecked which communicates that there are no consequences for abuses of power, which only invites more abuses of power.
If there aren't consequences for power being used against others, there won't be consequences for power being used against you.
Weapons of war used by colonizers to oppress others inevitably turn these to crush dissent at home. And also journalism about atrocities such as what happened to Julian Assange or objection to military adventurism as the NYT turned on Chris Hedges.
Readit News
https://genasys.com/lrad-products/
It's a legal gray area in Serbia where the use against civilians isn't explicitly forbidden, so they're playing fast and loose and moving fast to crush opposition. It's better than troops just gunning people down, but for a modern, supposedly civilized country it's horrible to see.
The people in power are the type of people that use their power in these ways. The US shouldn't be supplying them. We're not the world police, we don't need to enforce global norms, and we shouldn't be selling hyperoffensive mass crowd control technology. They should be limited to Temu LRAD, or their LRAD at home; we shouldn't be providing them S-Tier dystopian authoritarian kits for DIY oppression.
The people that profited off of this are a special kind of evil. We shouldn't be outfitting dictators, gangsters, or warlords.
But, greed is good. The dollar is king. This is what happens when incentives and principles don't align.
Except you're far more likely to use it.
This is why cops don't shoot to "injure" instead of kill (also, it's hard enough for them to hit center of mass in a tense situation; there's no way they hit a leg.) It's lethal force. Which means that for its use to be legal, that person has to die because they are an imminent lethal threat to others. If injury is sufficient to resolve a situation, they weren't an imminent lethal threat.
Tasers started out as a way to temporarily incapacitate someone so you didn't have to shoot them. Now they're being used as compliance and corporal punishment devices.
Lots of videos out there of cops ordering people to do something while shocking them with something that makes their entire body lock up and is extremely painful.
They know the person can't do what they want them to. "Stop resisting!" while tasering someone is the cop version of "stop hitting yourself!"
That requires more explanation.
An injury could render someone with lethal intent and capability unable to perform.
LRAD + Tear gas 2009
Tear gas 2017
Tear gas 2021
Still got the exhausted canister from 2009 as a souvenir. Carry a bottle of water, the tear gas rinses out quickly.
If they have been used in other countries against US diplomatic corps that is an act of war.
Now if a US citizen uses a visit to a foreign country to protest against a government they’re on their own. I’m sorry, but US citizens shouldn’t be engaging in that and the US state department has no obligation to protect that condition.
Deleted Comment
How do you reconcile this statement with the rest of your comment in which you are advocating for enforcing global norms?
So, it’s not like LRAD is controlled like SAMs or something. Also, pretty trivial to build. Idk what the IP looks like on it , but back of the napkin you can build a 1kw unit for around $7000 buying the parts at retail. The expensive bits are the transducers. Everything else is a few mosfets and MCU/software.
That's 1 out of 4 working age citizens hitting the streets - not all people, but a huge chunk. It's safe to say there are going to be a lot of sympathizers in the non-protesters, a lot of people who wanted to protest but couldn't. There are definitely those who support the government, but I'd wager they're less than 15% of the total population, with the rest in opposition, or at least not in support of the government.
The usual tipping point for revolution is lower - if 10-12% hits the streets, it's a strong signal that the movement behind that activity is taking power.
Someone should definitely enforce international laws and norms and the US was in the best place to do it
It just screams "escalation" to me.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
We are getting to the point where the technology that fuels oppression, including extremely pervasive surveillance, privatized intelligence services with no oversight, scalable AI agents that do as they are told, and crowd "maiming" or other forceful dispersal techniques are growing past the ability to resist them.
Wars historically happened under conditions where people died but the planet was largely left in tact, but we now have 3 countries with the ability to erase entire cities or make the world functionally uninhabitable by humans, which absolutely changes the calculus of war. If you do not have nukes your sovereignty is questionable.
Likewise if the tools to put down crowds, find saboteurs, and weed out dissent is perfected, meaningful dissent can only be expressed through withdrawal and there is no final check on abuses of power where any, instead of some, of the "checkers" of power are left in tact. Anti-dissent technology has the potential for a nuclear moment that fundamentally changes the calculus of protest and I think AI is very much potentially that.
And then consider drones, mobile devices. And then mass disinformation and/or disruption via LLMs.
As a long time advocate of old school mass action, and a believe in active protest movements as part of a healthy democracy, I have a strong feeling of unease. I've had it since about 9/11, but it's now really bad.
e.g. if you know, with certainty, that heading out to a protest could lead to your instant termination from your job because a drone passed over and took a photo and identified all 100,000 people in the crowd instantly.. would you still go?
Or if having been identified, some malevolent actor could just turn around and mass produce fake content from you and others in the crowd, to discredit you?
Shivers.
"Walk without rhythm and it won't attract the worm."
The funny thing is that most people see this as a feature rather than a bug. Before the 2024 election the policies of most surveillance platforms roughly matched the culture of upper-middle-class Californians, so the argument was "if abusive technology is used to shut down opinions I don't like, I don't see a problem with that". Good luck explaining why such an attitude is a problem.
If we're talking the Russia, the US and China then they certainly have the largest arsenals, but there's an order of magnitude difference between the stockpiles of the first two and the third. China doesn't have that many more nukes than France, and only has about double the number of warheads of the UK (though it is questionable how independent from the US the UK's capability is).
And then there's Pakistan, India, Israel and North Korea.
(https://www.icanw.org/nuclear_arsenals)
from: Nuclear Notebook, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
~ Hans M. Kristensen, Matt Korda, Eliana Johns, Mackenzie Knight | March 12, 2025
* https://thebulletin.org/premium/2025-03/chinese-nuclear-weap...Also, the threshold laid out above was "erase an entire city" OR "make planet unihabitable".
Any nation or group with a first gen atomic weapon can erase a city .. exercising that ability can potentially lead to a greater nuclear exchange between others, particularly if it's unclear what happened and what might be about to happen.
Words don't matter, only actions matter. "upvotes don't count."
A street presence can barely be mustered.
Also if you start learning about history, you'll learn that "intellectuals" are the first people totalitarians crack down in precisely because of this threat you just made. So by the time you realize you need to make good on your threat, chances are it will be too late. Don't read about the Khmer Rouge killing fields or the Indonesian "communist" purge if you want to have a good day. American exceptionalism is fueling a "can't happen here" attitude that's fueling people's denial about our many potential futures. Inaction means that we aren't influencing what that future is. We are at someone else's whims. History doesn't tell you what will happen, but it tells you what can happen.
You're saying right now you're speaking softly, but carrying a big stick, so they better listen. I don't think you're carrying one, and the republicans purging the old guard and replacing them with loyalists don't think you are either. You're just speaking softly. We all seem to be.
Only 3?
Nuclear war is horrible enough without requiring hyperbole. Each of the U.S., Russia and China have the ability to functionally end industrial civlisation as we know it. None has the power to make the Earth uninhabitable by humans (outside hypothetical asteroid redirect capabilities).
The silicon valley elite are practically going insane over the prospect of total authoritarian control of the "lessers" ... of course couched in pure libertarian nonsense about unrestained freedom of the ultrarich to do as they please to them.
No. Just no. No matter what what the thing is. It just isn't.
That's not a reason to NOT protest/fight unchecked power. It just isn't the reason to do it.
This isn't the 1800s anymore where the most powerful tool was a gun, and you could distribute these symmetrically across state and people to keep the state in check.
Surveillance, crowd control weapons, access to banking, control over media, eventually AI and widespread robotics, have properties that empower the state. In the context of mass protest, the status quo gets harder and harder to dislodge.
None of this matters much while democracy is still existing, but it's a risk that's there. It makes the fall of democracy more of an absorbing state that you can't escape from.
> It's the most important time in human history to protest/fight unchecked power because it's likely the last era of humanity that we are going to be able to.
Athenians were saying this in respect of writing.
All demonstrations of LRAD I heard on youtube were with high pitched sound, not a "whoosh" as witnesses experienced last night in Belgrade. Can these devices play any kind of sound?
What is described by victims, and what can be heard on some recordings from last nights, sounds more like Vortex Cannon:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GJpChS-_RJg
I’m ever so slightly suspicious of the “low frequency sound weapon” aspect because that typically takes a lot of energy (I’m speaking from an audio background). However the reports of feeling uneasy do match that of infrasound… yet typically (based on what I’ve read) infrasound doesn’t have an instant reaction but takes some time for people to feel it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directed-energy_weapon has a lot more info if anyone is interested.
https://x.com/earshot_ngo/status/1901661518153781534
Note that many videos didn't record the sound if the phone was further away from that center line.
This is the recording which perhaps captured sound the best:
https://x.com/stonexman/status/1901034916961309148
Dead Comment
https://www.reddit.com/r/serbia/comments/1jchks6/novi_snimci...
Please take into account that this occurred during the fifteen-minute silence observed by the protesters in memory of the fifteen victims of the accident, which the protesters blame on the government corruption and which was the very reason for the start of the protests.
The student organizers in the crowd did an incredible job clearing people out of there before the police could escalate further and cause more mob-crowding panic deaths.
Ah so these sonic weapons are indeed seriously harmful. I was wondering if hearing loss was a result.
Deleted Comment
Once an organization actually attacks you, it's very easy to decide that any legitimacy they view themselves as having is irrelevant and to come back next Monday with mortars and machine guns.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estimated_number_of_civilian_g...
Where the heck are they going to get those in Serbia? Weren't they rounded up after the war, especially mortars?
Also that sort of thing tends not to last very long against the regular army, who have a much larger supply of materiel and are better trained. It only really works if the army flips politically against the regime (think Ceaucescu, or less violently the Carnation Revolution).
I've personally been to weddings in both Serbia and Montenegro, in the early-mid 2000s, where they fired full auto weapons with live rounds into the air. AK variants and such. I remember us kids collecting shell casings and stripper clips.
I'd say that it's mostly handguns and hand grenades, some AK and SKS variants, obsolete 40s-50s SMGs given out to territorial defense decades ago, some bolt action rifles and some Zoljas (anti tank rocket) and AP mines from the war.
I remember a guy in Podgorica, Montenegro (local football hooligan and drug dealer) firing a Zolja at a department store at night. He had obtained it for 200 euros in Belgrade, Serbia and "had to try it out". [1]
I also remember them catching a 15 year old with an AK in 2017 in Podgorica, Montenegro. [2]
I loved frequenting the local flea market and you could regularly see stuff like helmets for sale, also some magazines (I remember seeing one for an MP40 or similar SMG). I also witnessed a transaction, a guy buying a small pistol from another guy at the flea market. The gun quickly changed hands and dissapeared in his jacket, but I saw it beyond doubt.
Anything else I could write would just bring into question my credibility, so I'll keep these stories for us who lived through it. It recently happened to me that I started quesioning my childhood memories (age 8 or so), like "did that really happen or did I imagine it", so I asked people I remembered were there with me, and yep it sure as hell did. I even forgot some details and people involved. But I'd have a hard time beleiving it if I heard it.
Also bear in mind that a lot of the people who have these weapons actually support the government and loved Vučić's old party from the 90s. For example, one of the people firing an AK at his son's wedding was a policeman, and his grandson is now a policeman and Vučić sympathiser in Belgrade.
[1] https://www.b92.net/o/info/vesti/index?nav_id=211841
[2] https://volimpodgoricu.me/novosti/podgorica-uhapsen-petnaest...
I'm pretty sure that's not actually how power or legitimacy work anyway.
The solution is then always an organized military response. This applies whether it's your government or somebody else's.
aggressive crowd control measures have been used very often and they almost never result in an armed rebellion. that's just nonsense. There are many MANY levels of escalation left for both sides - as well as the real expectation of behind the scenes diplomacy and within-the-system politics.
like really, are you just fantasizing about a balkan civil war because it's exciting? or are you trying to get more people to think that civil disagreement may as well be considered warfare? just what are you on about, mate?
The imperial boomerang: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_boomerang
If you see injustice but do nothing, you invite the same injustice on yourself.
Injustice at it's core is an arbitrary execution of power, so suffering injustice anywhere is to let power stay unchecked which communicates that there are no consequences for abuses of power, which only invites more abuses of power.
If there aren't consequences for power being used against others, there won't be consequences for power being used against you.