Thailand's "Q" Banks on Rubber Bullets

redwolfoz writes "ABC News reports that Thailand's answer to 'Q', the legendary inventor of gadgets for movie spy James Bond, is busy at work at his warehouse on the edge of the country's capital. Workmen inside are trying out the latest inventions of retired Major Songphon Eiamboonyarith, who runs defence contracting firm Precipart Co. The range includes umbrellas that shoot rubber bullets, bullet-proof baseball caps and a hand-held device to fire a man-sized net 10m to stop a villain in his tracks."

Comments

credbibility

[meekg]

why should a rubber-bullet gun be disguised as an umbrella ??
A rubber-bullet gun is for deterrence, and should look like a shotgun, or something even more evil.

An advancing police line armed with umbrellas will most likely not cause a crows to disperse.

More likely, the umbrella is quite lethal, in the assassination meaning of the word, but since this is a PG rated story, it's been modified A-Team style.

Everyone's gotta have a hobby.
Mr. Songphon's happened to be killing.

o well.

Re:credbibility

[Squarewav]

the idea is for protection, if you shoot some mugger with your umbrella, hopefully they run away thinking they've just been shot with a real bullet. as for just carrying a shotgun with you, your going to get some bad reactions from police and people on the street

Not to much is really 'Bullet-Proof"

[Cyno01]

Bullet-proof is rarely what its called, a standard kevlar bullet-proof vest will stop many smaller caliber shots, but you can still get killed, even if the vest isn't pierced, if your hit in the chest with a powerful enough shot, even if the vest stops the round you can still die from hydrostatic shock, the same goes for the kevlar vests with metal inserts, they my stop powerfull rounds, but if u look at the after photos from testing, you can see the plates of metal with large(2 or more centimeter) deep depressions, it may not penetrate, but that much force hitting you in the chest is enough to cause quite a bit of damage

Re:Why no pepper-spray paintball guns?

[Shirloki]

With those factors considered, a paintball, which is a hazard being shot at 300fps (lost eyes, broken teeth, bruises, welts, and other assorted nastys), could well almost become a lethal-"non-lethal" crowd control method.

Actually, current "non-lethal" weapons, such as rubber bullets do kill pretty often. A pepper spray paintball would not kill nearly as often simply because of the fact that it explodes and absorbs much of its own force by itself. However, the pepper spray would do the deterrent job of beanbags and rubber bullets quite nicely. Obviously, that still doesn't help with severe eye damage, but if you pepper spray somone with regular mace, you're still gonna damage/destroy their eyes anyway.