The impact is unbreathability the key tenant of property is the ability to protect it. This logic of protecting property in the 1ac justifies the dropping of tear gas onto protesters as a call to assert ownership and monopoly over power and violence inherent in the capitalist and imperialist state. Unbreathability outweighs and exacerbates the violence of slavery and genocide cutting off the feeling of breathing free air

It is also important to note that tear gas is a specific mechanism of violence meant to protect property and capitalist interests. In the 1964 riots and in the U.S.-Vietnam war, tear gas was used to disperse and “command territory.” Schrader suggests that new formulations of CS came after the Vietnam war in order to control access to terrain. He mentions that in order to keep people away from a given location “CS would be used to create a barrier.”63In a sense, CS serves as an agent that defines the space in terms of property. Meaning, the State employs tear gas in moments such as the Vietnam war and the 1964 to assert ownership and both military and police control over the territory. Given that tear gas only activates when it comes into contact with the human body…the physical space itself is not damaged or threatened. Unlike other war weapons, such as bombs and Napalm, tear gas does not have any effect on surrounding physical structures. Thus, as the bodies it comes into contact with tear gas experiencing pain and agony, the buildings, land, and territory are all preserved. As such, the U.S. deploys teargas on bodies of color in an effort to define that space and practice control and ownership over it. In the context of the ongoing project of conquest, the use of tear gas continues to define Indigenous land as U.S. property, which allows for a continued assertion of ownership and control over that land. Additionally, in asserting control and ownership via the use of tear gas, the atmosphere itself is characterized through a violence and genocide, especially for bodies of color.

In effect, tear gas is a metaphor for the toxic particles that make up capitalism and colonialism, as well as the literal manifestation of the toxicity of these structures. These regimes create an atmosphere and landscape of violence and un-breathability that is felt across the land and airspace, exacerbating the already present atmosphere of violence and genocide. Indeed, the very atmosphere where Black, Indigenous and migrant breathing takes place, is an atmosphere of violence, pain and often, death. On this, Christina Sharpe, author of In the Wake: on Blackness and Being, suggests that “there is too a connection between the lungs and the weather; the supposedly transformative properties of breathing free air—that which throws off the mantle of slavery—and the transformative properties of being ‘free’ to breathe fresh air.” Fresh air, as a part of an unattainable atmosphere, represents a vision for the future. A vision that is not marked by the toxic particles that currently occupy the environment. In speaking specifically about Black bodies, Sharpe expresses that the weather “registers and produces the conventions of antiblackness in the present and into the future.”64 Sharpe’s theorization of the weather and the atmosphere stages how tear gas is not a meaningless act. It is an act of producing environments that are unbreathable and unlivable.