I really don't remember enough about the media landscape in the runup to the Iraq war to know whether people were drawing the distinction or not; certainly they didn't make much impact since people associate WMD with large-scale destruction. However, you might want to consider the disparity between the individual and the state here; just as a handgun is a more suitable weapon for an individual than a howitzer, the quantitative impact for something to qualify as a WMD would be scaled up accordingly. And this is what happens in practice; if I pipe tear gas into your air ducts it counts as WMD, but chemical warfare between nations usually involves nerve gas or similarly horrific stuff.
I don't see this as the state reserving special privileges over the individual, incidentally; it seems to me that this an inevitable consequence of multiple individuals pooling a small degree of their individual sovereignty into military and police forces.
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I really don't remember enough about the media landscape in the runup to the Iraq war to know whether people were drawing the distinction or not; certainly they didn't make much impact since people associate WMD with large-scale destruction. However, you might want to consider the disparity between the individual and the state here; just as a handgun is a more suitable weapon for an individual than a howitzer, the quantitative impact for something to qualify as a WMD would be scaled up accordingly. And this is what happens in practice; if I pipe tear gas into your air ducts it counts as WMD, but chemical warfare between nations usually involves nerve gas or similarly horrific stuff.
I don't see this as the state reserving special privileges over the individual, incidentally; it seems to me that this an inevitable consequence of multiple individuals pooling a small degree of their individual sovereignty into military and police forces.