This chapter explains how the technical evolution of rifled guns and their bullets altered the lethality of gun violence during the industrial era. It explains how over the course of a century (1850–1950), these industrial weapons, which were so much more lethal than the smoothbore muskets of the past, revolutionised gun violence and made the power to kill accessible to all. It argues that it was the accessibility of this power of life and death, and the expansion of the global trade in these weapons, that affected what contemporaries viewed as legitimate forms of gun violence. The chapter argues that it was the invention of ‘less’ lethal bullets in the 1880s and early 1890s that ensured that when the British military deployed deeply destructive ‘dum-dum’ bullets in their wars in India and Sudan it inspired global media outrage. This outrage inspired the delegates at The Hague Conference of 1899 to ban these ammunitions in the laws of war. This ban helped to entrench the idea that some forms of gun violence are more transgressive than others and that dum-dum bullets are unconscionable weapons.

The St Petersburg Declaration of 1868 was the first international agreement that regulated a modern weapon of war. It did so by outlawing the military deployment of small arms ammunitions that exploded or fulminated on impact. This chapter narrates the history of the Declaration by analysing the uses made of exploding bullets in the 1860s. It explains how considerations of their inherent lethality informed the terms of the treaty, including the norms of superfluous injury and unnecessary suffering which remain foundational to international humanitarian law today. It also shows how after 1868, the military use of exploding bullets was cast as an act of barbarism in the global media. Compliance reporting became a regular feature of newspaper accounts of colonial and inter-state warfare, including the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. This reporting helped to inspire an attempt to ban expanding small arms ammunitions at the Brussels Conference of 1874. The chapter underlines the centrality of the St Petersburg Declaration to the ways in which people viewed gun violence in the late nineteenth century as well as to the regulation of dum-dum bullets in 1899.

In 1899, the first Hague Conference outlawed the military use of expanding small arms ammunitions, also known as dum-dum bullets. This chapter contextualises this moment of weapons regulation, connecting it to the controversies that evolved around smokeless gunpowder ammunitions during the 1890s, beginning with so-called ‘humanitarian’ full-metal jacket bullets that created smaller and cleaner wounds than the previous generation of large-calibre ‘man-stopping’ bullets. When the British military decided to modify their full-metal jacket bullets so that they would wound and kill their adversaries more effectively, media outrage ensued, which was fuelled by evocative newspaper reporting and graphic reproductions of dum-dum wounds. This media frenzy helped to justify the dum-dum ban at The Hague. The chapter also describes the public diplomacy strategies employed by the British government in justifying their use of these bullets, particularly against non-European and colonial adversaries. Altogether, the chapter shows how quickly the idea that a dum-dum bullet was a peculiarly transgressive weapon was normalised.

After 1899, newspapers frequently reported on dum-dum bullets and demonised those who utilised them. Belligerents also mobilised references to alleged enemy breaches of the law in their public diplomacy and propaganda campaigns. Such allegations were particularly prominent during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 and the First World War. However, the chapter also shows that the term ‘dum-dum’ very quickly came to be utilised as a short-hand reference to identify other moments of transgressive gun violence. Across the twentieth century, a reference to a dum-dum bullet functioned as a marker to explain the normative stakes in time of colonial, state and interpersonal violence as well as to identify a perpetrator as a transgressor. Even after the enormous destruction of the First World War made a mockery of the law of war, dum-dum references proliferated. They continue to do so today. This chapter explains the extra-legal and political contours of these mediated references and argues that dum-dum allegations both enabled and hid a world of enormous violence.

This short epilogue explores the world’s ongoing fascination with dum-dum bullets as peculiarly transgressive weapons. It shows how the act of regulating expanding and exploding bullets in the nineteenth century continues to impact how international humanitarian law operates and how the media engages with different kinds of gun violence, their wounds and lethality.