Hi RR,
I'm writing on an open letter to the Pennsylvania-based supplier of tear gas that the Turkish police are currently using in extreme quantities, and as projectiles, against thousands of protesters as well as non-protesting citizens in Turkey. I thought I'd make the case in the letter that their product is being misused, kind of how a U.S. middle school teacher made the same case in his letter to Defense Technologies in 2012, excerpted from his blog at the bottom of this email.
Then, I want to find some case examples to add to the open letter. Either A) cases where a company has learned its product was being used to hurt people and publicly stopped supplying it to those who were doing the misusing, and/or B) cases where a company was asked to stop supplying a product that was being used harmfully, didn't stop, and then was subsequently condemned by history for their reticence.
Maybe a weapons company, computers, something...? My sister mentioned a case involving IBM computers in wartime, but didn't know how this situation had turned out.
Please let me know if you have ideas for case examples for this letter. (Also any other data that could help the letter be convincing and strong.)
Also, I think NonLethal Technologies is the name of the main company supplying tear gas to Turkish government police right now this week, but I'd love to have help confirming this, and help finding out how to contact them and also contact the pepper spray supplier.
Thank you very much for all that you do. I hope this question is answerable.
All best,
Rae
"I have no doubt that the millions of dollars worth of tear gas cannisters you produce have their place—a non-lethal and usually harmless method of dispersing mobs who have gone out of control, but this is not how the Republic of Turkey uses your product. The police break up every manner of gathering in a similar way that they did ours—whether it is a group of secular nationalist on Indepence Day, a gathering of Kurdish mothers in a tent, townspeople protesting the building of a dam or students objecting to tuition hikes. They attack teachers, church goers (a sizeable Christian community lives in Istanbul), democrats, rock musicians, children and housewives. And the gas cannisters are certainly not always harmless—a Google image search on ‘tear gas cannisters’ is enough to yield some pictures of injuries from these things that turns your stomach. There are rumors sometimes that the police are deliberately targeting people.
I am writing to ask you to be more judicial in who you select as your customers, to not sell your product who regularly use it to attack their own people."
IBM
The case you're talking about with IBM is about the Holocaust. IBM knowingly supplied the adding and sorting machines which were used at the concentration camps to sort and collate information about the prisoners.
There's a whole book written about it, called "IBM and the Holocaust". I haven't read it, but I understand that IBM never accepted responsibility for it actions, despite evidence that they were aware that the machines were being used to process prisoner records.
As far as your research about companies retracting their weapons sales, there was a guy who was on KPFA or Democracy Now a year or two ago, who I believe invented pepper spray, and was talking about how it was being used by police in unintended ways and out of spec. You could try searching the Democracy Now website or KPFA.org to try and track him down; I'm sure he would be able to help you with specific examples.
I wish you luck, but you're asking the company to cut into its own profits, so I can't really say that I expect it to work.