NEXT-​​GEN STUN GUNS TARGET CROWDS

The prob­lem with today’s stun guns is that you can unload a can of elec­tri­cal whoop-​​ass only on one per­son at a time. But that’s start­ing to change, New Scientist says.
Militaries and their con­trac­tors are get­ting closer to putting the hurt on a whole bunch of peo­ple at once, accord­ing to the mag­a­zine, with “weapons that can inca­pac­i­tate crowds of peo­ple by sweep­ing a lightning-​​like beam of elec­tric­ity across them.“
Currently, stun guns like the Taser “work only at close quar­ters,” and only effect one per­son at a time, the mag­a­zine notes. That’s because the Taser uses a pair of darts, teth­ered to a wire, to deliver its elec­tric shock. Range is lim­ited to less than 25 feet.
If they work as planned — a big if — “the new breed of non-​​lethal weapons can be used on many peo­ple at once and oper­ate over far greater dis­tances,” by ditch­ing the wires.
A weapon under devel­op­ment by Rheinmetall, based in Dsseldorf, Germany, cre­ates a con­duct­ing chan­nel by using a small explo­sive charge to squirt a stream of tiny con­duc­tive fibres through the air at the vic­tim.
Meanwhile, Xtreme Alternative Defense Systems (XADS), based in Anderson, Indiana, will be one of the first com­pa­nies to mar­ket another type of wire­less weapon. Instead of using fibres, the $9000 Close Quarters Shock Rifle projects an ionised gas, or plasma, towards the tar­get, pro­duc­ing a con­duct­ing chan­nel. It will also inter­fere with elec­tronic igni­tion sys­tems and stop vehi­cles.
“We will be able to fire a stream of elec­tric­ity like water out of a hose at one or many tar­gets in a sin­gle sweep,” claims XADS pres­i­dent Peter Bitar.
The gun has been designed for the US Marine Corps to use for crowd con­trol and secu­rity pur­poses and is due out next year. It is based on early, unwieldy tech­nol­ogy and has a range of only 3 metres, but an oper­a­tor can debil­i­tate mul­ti­ple tar­gets by sweep­ing it across them for “as long as there is an input power source,” says Bitar.
XADS is also plan­ning a more advanced weapon which it hopes will have a range of 100 metres or more. Instead of fir­ing ionised gas, it will prob­a­bly use a pow­er­ful laser to ionise the air itself.
THERE’S MORE: Slashdot is sus­pi­cious of XADS — “So, this com­pany has a free-​​hosting web­site and and a free-​​email address for their ‘pres­i­dent,’ and the photo looks like card­board tubes wrapped with green cam­ou­flage tape. Hmmmm.“
AND MORE: The com­pany does have a small busi­ness con­tract with the Navy for a “Personnel Neuromuscular Disruptor Incapacitation System” — awarded November ’02.
AND MORE: Defense Review inter­views XADS’ pres­i­dent here.

June 17th, 2004 | Less-lethal | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.