Pirates on the rise!

[King Flevance]

Time for the U.S. to declare the "War on Piracy"

 

[IglooDame]

Time for the U.S. to declare the "War on Piracy"

I thought the RIAA already had...

 

[Aegis]

Time for the U.S. to declare the "War on Piracy"

I guess it's time to implement our "Shock and Arrrr!" policy. =oP

 

[soul_warrior]

Hey pal, every major power had privateer operations running, that includes France, Holland, Spain, Portugal, Sweden, even the United States. The British one are the most famous ones, like Sir Francis Drake, or Captain Kidd.

AND the most effective ones
it all depends on what side youre looking from.

my guess is that the good, honest, opium trade is considered as piracy by some chinese.
you could possibly agree to that, as the chinese did NOT allow the import of opium.
they DID however alos not allow any silver or gold to be exported.
thus forcing the british to smuggle illegal goods into china, becoming pirates.

well.
i am darn proud to be a former pirate!!!

 

[Cuivienen]

Why no marines/guns on merchant ships?

Probably a European Union thang: it would violate the "human rights" of the pirates.....

Light, at least read the thread before trolling. It's because armed forces on merchant ships makes them... military ships... which means that they then can't enter other countries' territorial waters. It's an old law from the days of... piracy. It makes it much more difficult for pirates to disguise themselves as merchant ships before attacking other ships or the coast.

 

[IglooDame]

Light, at least read the thread before trolling. It's because armed forces on merchant ships makes them... military ships... which means that they then can't enter other countries' territorial waters. It's an old law from the days of... piracy. It makes it much more difficult for pirates to disguise themselves as merchant ships before attacking other ships or the coast.

I may be harping on a minor point here, but even naval auxiliaries (and for that matter, naval warships) can enter other countries' territorial waters, it simply requires them to be conducting "innocent passage" (which is to say, targeting radars off, not exercising gun crews, etc) and the host country can deny it at any time. Naval auxiliaries, even ones with platoons of heavily armed marines onboard, are not substantial threats to the host countries and would only trip the most sensitive of political tripwires.

Anyway, we'd likely be talking about private security types anyway, and those most definitely would not qualify them as military ships. The problem continues to be that host countries' firearm laws are mixed and varied, and most serious anti-boarding weapons (grenades and automatic weapons) are restricted or banned in most countries. That I know of (and I welcome correction), international conventions and the Law of the Sea do not in principle require private commercial or pleasure craft to be unarmed.