Sometimes stories don’t require the embellishment of a rant. They scream all by themselves.


Raw Story has unearthed this shocker: “WEAPONS designed to fire ‘electric bullets’ into crowds are being developed for police and border protection agencies in the US,” according to the UK publication, the New Scientist.


[T]he government is developing a new generation of electric shock weapons that could be fired from across a city street or across a sports stadium. A Texas company called Lynntech is developing a projectile that can be fired from a shotgun or grenade launcher that sticks to the target and delivers an 80,000-volt shock for seven seconds. Further shocks can be triggered via remote control. (From Democracy Now! headlines, Aug. 23, 2005)



Says New Scientist: “The Homeland Security Advanced Research Projects Agency, the domestic equivalent of the defence agency DARPA, has launched an ‘innovative less-lethal devices for law enforcement” programme to radically expand the capabilities of electric shock weapons.”


Adds Reuters UK:

The [U.S. Dept.] of Homeland Security is seeking alternatives with broader uses like light lasers or guns firing electric bullets to combat all manner of felon.


“People encountered can range from aggressors who are hardened criminals to mentally disturbed teenagers … from protesting crowds that include children and elderly, to street gangs,” the Homeland Security Department, which is soliciting prototypes from industry, said on its Web site.

You guessed it. There are no stories in the U.S. press on this, save Democracy Now!‘s brief mention this morning.

MORE BELOW — including how the weapons “stick” to the person (aka target) via “hooks” and “barbs”:
Meanwhile, far less potent, shorter-range weapons — such as the Taser — are under growing scrutiny for numerous deaths and injuries from the supposedly safe prisoner-control device. “Stun gun manufacturer Taser is facing another lawsuit over the safety of its product,” reports Democracy Now!.

The lawsuit was filed by a Missouri police chief “claiming that he was severely injured after being shocked with a Taser weapon during training.”



Existing stun weapons, such as the Taser, “typically fire a pair of darts trailing current-carrying wires to shock the target, with a maximum range of about 7 metres.” The new, wireless weapons can be “used over greater distances in spaces such as ‘an auditorium, a city street or a sports stadium’.”


Talk Left blog reports that:

Taser acknowledges that it has been sued 14 times since 2003 by officers who say they were injured in training.

The report said the company also faces 12 wrongful death lawsuits and four lawsuits alleging injuries during arrest or detention. Three other wrongful death suits have been dismissed, and one is on hold.

Perhaps fearful of being forced to compensate all the individuals who have been seriously injured (or killed) after being shocked with a weapon Taser International claims to be safe, Taser has opted to discourage litigation by refusing to settle any lawsuit. A few multi-million dollar verdicts might produce a change in that strategy. So might an SEC investigation into whether the company has fraudulently misstated the safety of the weapon, and class action lawsuits like this one:

The village of Dolton, Ill., near Chicago, stopped using its Tasers in May and filed a class action lawsuit in federal court last month. That suit says Taser’s marketing portrays the unit as safe but that the product “has been involved in numerous deaths and serious injuries across the country” and has never been “adequately or independently tested for safety.”

<Aug. 22, 2005)


Talk Left blog has built an archive of materials on the Taser.

More from the New Scientist:


Lynntech of College Station, Texas, is developing a projectile that can be fired from a shotgun or 40-millimetre grenade launcher. Grenade launchers are already used by riot police to fire tear gas and baton rounds. On impact, the device sticks to the target and delivers an 80,000-volt shock for 7 seconds, using a pulsed delivery similar to that used by Tasers. Further shocks can be triggered via remote control.



Brian Hennings, system integration group leader at Lynntech, would not reveal how the projectile sticks to the person, although other weapons designed to adhere often use hooks or barbs. “The biggest problem was making the device non-lethal at minimum range, yet effective at maximum range,” he says.



Hennings claims Lynntech has solved this by ensuring that its round’s kinetic energy is low enough to meet the safety requirement at close range. As the projectile does not rely on impact with the body to incapacitate the person, it does not need to be fired at very high velocity. The weapon’s maximum range is measured in tens of metres, the company says.



Meanwhile, Midé Technology Corporation of Medford, Massachusetts, is proposing the Piezer. Rather than conventional stun-gun circuitry, with batteries linked to transformers and a capacitor, the Piezer contains piezoelectric crystals, which produce a voltage when they are compressed. The Piezer would be fired from a 12-gauge shotgun, stunning the target with an electric shock on impact. Shotguns are already used to fire less-lethal “beanbag” rounds to subdue suspects, but these have short range. Midé claims the Piezer could be effective at 40 to 50 metres.



Using a different principle again is the Inertial Capacitive Incapacitator (ICI) being developed by the Physical Optics Corporation of Torrance, California. …




Check Raw Story for updates on this developing story.