I'd Choose to be Stunned

Non-lethal defense and capture weapons are rapidly becoming more widespread, although they haven’t been welcomed with the glad cries of relief one might have expected from the voices of the media…

The topic interests me because it seems obvious (to me) that there are times when it is necessary to either defend yourself or restrain someone with the minimum of inflicted injury – why we have had to rely on lethal guns and possibly equally deadly clubs up to this point in time is a mystery to me. Science fiction becoming reality (i.e. “Set your Phaser to stun, Mr. Scott…”) is another reason for my intense interest.

The best-known examples are police tasers (http://www.taser.com/Pages/default.aspx) and personal pepper spray, the first being a capture/restraint device and the second a defense against personal attack (in main usage). A more ray gun like and newer development is the “Active Denial”/”Silent Guardian” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Denial_System is a fair compendium). Farther down the page we find such interesting items as the LED Incapacitator (a.k.a. the Puke Saber - http://www.intopsys.com/)

The outcry against such non-lethal weapons took me by surprise. Why would anyone be outraged by something intended to reduce the injury and death associated with those situations where restraint, incapacitation or defense was deemed necessary? (an example can be seen in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pepper_spray#_note-13 - which has an associated set of discussions highlighting the negative view of pepper spray). One might think that the troops of the we-are-for peace/end-the-violence-now groups would be selling non-lethal defenses door to door…

Opponents of such non-lethals quickly point to examples of failure of the particular weapon to be non-lethal, or at least non-injurious in a lasting sense. Accepting the numbers as factual, the incident of injury/death for each of these types of weapon (well, the “Active Denial”/”Silent Guardian” weapons haven’t actually seen field use… but human tests have been conducted) are near zero as a probability, and near certainty without (assuming guns and clubs in place of non-lethals).

This not-100%-non-lethal contention is obviously not the whole argument against the existence of such weapons, as any thinking person would quickly choose to be shot with a taser instead of shot with a gun. It’s the whole “is he/she going to shoot me?” likelihood that skews the thinking. After all, most folks are less likely to shoot someone if they are sure that the target person would be injured. An excellent probe into this and other aspects can be found at http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/201700_taser30.html

Still, it’s not really believable that ‘less-than-lethal’ weapons used more often could be worse than ‘yup, it’s lethal’ weapons in the same situations.

The next most frequent objection is that (note the change in my naming-reference) less-than-lethal weapons might be used to torture people. No one seems to see how really silly this contention is! If I was going to be tortured, I’d rather it be a controlled electric shock or pepper spray than the good old rubber hoses, clubs, fists, etc… Seriously, although torture is an issue in it’s own right; torture has NO bearing on less-than-lethal weapons! None!

The fact that torture is cited as a rejection criteria is psychologically revealing – the true fear is the idea of such less-than-lethal weapons being used to punish perceived misbehavior without benefit of trial, judge, jury by overzealous authorities or vigilante types.

(The Active Denial system comes with way-early accusations of torture, even though it hasn’t actually been deployed yet - as if one could easily back the truck it comes mounted on into your dungeon for the purpose of tormenting victims. Here’s an example - http://dwb.sacbee.com/content/news/story/9499345p-10423294c.html)

Finally, less-than-lethal weapons represent a formidable amount of power over persons who just might wish to express their opinions by somewhat disruptive civil disobedience… Here’s the true fear revealed – Ghandi wouldn’t have been nearly as effective if his entourage had fled yelping from a ‘pain beam’, or puking their guts out like a bunch of college frat boys on Friday night.