The chemical name is 2-chlorobenzylidene malononitrile. The military calls it CS. Most people just call it tear gas, because it causes eyes to water, not to mention snot to flow. It is part of a class of substances known as riot control agents. It has been used since the 1950s in law enforcement situations, and the military uses it to demonstrate to recruits (and others) the importance of fitting and wearing the chemical protective mask properly.
But let’s be clear: anyone who refers to CS as a “chemical weapon” is absolutely correct, but also absolutely, undoubtedly, unquestionably misleading. So are those who breathlessly claim that it “could” be lethal to children and those with asthma. More on that in a moment, but first, let’s review what prompted this discussion.
ICE And the Caravan
On Sunday, officers of the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol deployed CS against protestors from the so-called migrant caravan that has made its way from Central America to the U.S.-Mexico border in Tijuana. A group of between 500 and 1,000 people split off from the main camp and moved to the border crossing at San Ysidro. There, they first overwhelmed the Mexican Federal Police who were trying to keep the border crossing closed, then sprinted for the U.S. side. Protestors threw rocks and bottles at CBP agents, but no one opened fire with lethal weapons. Agents employed long accepted non-lethal methods.
CS Gas is annoying, not dangerous
CS gas, as anyone who’s encountered it will tell you, is unpleasant stuff. Your eyes and lungs burn, and your nose runs down to your knees. You cough and spit and gasp for air. But it’s also practically harmless.
A February 2000 article in The BMJ (once upon a time known as the British Medical Journal) concluded that “if CS tear gas is used by properly trained law enforcement officers and exposed combatants leave the area rapidly, few, if any, significant or long-term human disabling effects should occur.” And despite its ominous title—”Lethal in Disguise: The Health Consequences of Crowd-Control Weapons—a Physicians for Human Rights and International Network of Civil Liberties Organizations report could cite just three cases where CS gas itself was a factor in a death.
The report cites an EPA study that estimated a lethal exposure to CS to be 140mg per cubic meter of air for 10 minutes, all the way down to 1.5mg per cubic meter for eight hours. In the first case, that’s a lot of CS; in the second, it’s a long time to be around the stuff. After all, the whole point of it is to cause people to go somewhere else away from the gas.
Of the report’s three cited cases, two were discovered through a literature review, and one of those isn’t even the fault of the gas itself. In that case, a person died when a CS canister, presumably fired from a launcher towards a crowd, struck the victim in the head. In the other case, a person died “as a result of respiratory arrest after CS was fired inside a home.” Neither of those are comparable to what took place at the border on Sunday.
The last case is admittedly horrific. In 2013, 37 of 45 Egyptian prisoners, who had been confined in a closed vehicle for several hours while they awaited transport, died after a CS grenade was fired into the vehicle, and the door closed behind it. This cannot remotely be considered the proper employment of CS. It certainly demonstrates that the gas can be lethal, but only under the most extreme, and deliberately cruel, circumstances.
Banned in War, not at home
It is true that the 1993 Chemical Weapons Ban Treaty that outlawed the use of neurotoxins like sarin and tabun (also known as GB and GA) or VX, also banned the use of riot control agents as weapons of war. But their inclusion in the treaty was, according to the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons, “the topic of long and heated debates” during the treaty negotiations. This is because almost every country in the world uses riot control agents for law enforcement purposes.
In the end, the parties agreed that they would refrain from using CS and other irritants in warfare. But the treaty specifically permits the use of riot control agents for law enforcement, as long as countries declare those chemicals they use.
So ironically, the only way the use of CS at the border on Sunday would be illegal would be if the rock throwing and the mob’s attempts to force its way across the border were considered an act of war. The left has consistently argued that the deployment of troops to the border is unnecessary because the caravan poses no military threat. If they’re not a military threat, the attempted incursion cannot be an act of war, and thus this is a law enforcement situation where CS is perfectly permissible.
The exposure of children is unfortunate. No parent, especially a parent who knows the effects of CS, would wish to see a child exposed to it. But neither would most parents continue to drag their children along with a crowd that had pledged a peaceful protest but then forced its way past a police blockade. The presence of women and children among those protesters at whom the CBP fired CS was small.
Those parents who kept their children in a dangerously escalating situation deserve the blame, not the CBP officers who acted consistent with decades of law enforcement practice. Practice, by the way, that includes hundreds of previous uses of CS at the border 26 times in Fiscal Year 2012 and 27 times in FY 2013, according to Department of Homeland Security records.
So please, let’s dial back the rhetoric a bit. The CBP agents at the border acted well within their rights, and well within long-established norms. As with so many things lately, the optics sucked, and Reuters photographer Kim Kyung-Hoon will likely win a Pulitzer for her photo of Maria Lila Meza Castro dragging her two children away from the CS canister. But other than the extraordinary photo, there was nothing extraordinary about the use of riot control agents in this circumstance.
