Dr. Jennifer Brown
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
So my name is Jennifer Brown.
I have a PhD in neuroscience and a law degree from the University of Minnesota.
And talking amongst ourselves, we said, well, we're PhD candidates.
We know how to research.
We know how to write.
What do we know about tear gas?
It started as a conversation among friends.
So it was first documented in World War I. I think most people will remember their high school history classes talking about mustard gas in the trenches and how terrible that was.
Everyone in the global community pretty quickly realized that—
Escalating chemical warfare was a really bad idea for everybody.
And so there's a convention against the use of chemical weapons.
And war has a lot of signatories.
So the U.S., it is illegal to use tear gas and other chemical weapons in war.
However, there is an exception for domestic policing.
But then I said, why?
Tear gas is an umbrella term.
Most of these chemicals, first off, are not gases.