New stun gun uses UV laser
June 17, 2004
SourceDEFENCE firms are about to pitch "a frightening new breed of stun gun" to police in America and Europe that has left human rights groups appalled about the risk to bystanders and people in poor health, New Scientist says.
"No independent safety tests have been carried out" on these new weapons, the British weekly says in its next issue, published on Saturday.
The present generation of electric stun gun is exemplified by the Taser, in use in many US police forces.
It hits the victim with two darts that trail current-carrying wires, which deliver a shock to the target.
But the gun fires a single shot with a range is limited to 7m, which makes it nearly useless for crowd control, especially in hotspots such as Iraq.
Engineers working for the Pentagon's research division, DARPA, and defence companies in the United States and Europe are trying to overcome those limitations by creating an electrically conductive path between a gun and a target but without using wires.
Xtreme Alternative Defense Systems (XADS), an Indiana company, has devised a "close quarters shock rifle" for the US Marine Corps that projects an ionised gas towards the target.
This produces a conducting channel down which a jolt can be sent.
"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," XADS president Peter Bitar is quoted as saying.
The device has a range of only 3m, but a 100m more advanced weapon is being planned.
Instead of firing ionised gas, that weapons will use a powerful ultraviolet laser to ionise the air with a pulse of more than 10 million megawatts, creating the conductive path to deliver a 50,000-volt, 26-watt shock similar to the Taser's.
The laser "is said not to harm the eyes," New Scientist says.
Three other companies, two of them American and one German, are also working prototypes of new stun guns.
Human rights groups, though, are horrified. The Red Cross says they risk becoming instruments of torture, and Amnesty International points out that innocent bystanders could suffer "pain and other suffering," New Scientist says.
Of the 30,000 times US police officers have fired Tasers, in 40 instances people stunned by them have later died, although in every case death has been officially attributed to causes other than the stun gun.