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Journalist Test Drives The Pain Ray Gun
Fantastic Lad writes to tell us that journalist Michael Hanlon recently got the opportunity to experience the Army's new not-so-secret weapon, dubbed "Silent Guardian". The Silent Guardian is essentially (even though the creators prefer you not refer to it as such) a ray gun, emitting a focused beam of radiation similar to your microwave tuned to a specific frequency to stimulate human nerve endings. "It can throw a wave of agony nearly half a mile. Because the beam penetrates skin only to a depth of 1/64th of an inch, it cannot, says Raytheon, cause visible, permanent injury. But anyone in the beam's path will feel, over their entire body, the agonizing sensation I've just felt on my fingertip. The prospect doesn't bear thinking about. "
We all know that heat coagulates protein. Just boil an egg. 1/64" of an inch of intense heating is enough to cook your cornea. Instant cataract. Out of all this "testing" with screaming "volunteers" I haven't really seen any conclusive evidence come forth that this wont do eye injury to a person. And we all know how "non-letal" (read "less than lethal") weapons get overused.
-dh
Have you ever been in agony? Okay, now imagine that feeling connected to an on/off switch that someone else's hand is on. That someone doesn't have your best interests at heart (rather, another set of interests, ranging from maintaining order to getting their rocks off). That someone can legally detain you and hold you immobile, take you into their custody, whose orders under most circumstances you are required to obey, and whose word in a court of law is more readily believed than yours. Guess what, when there are no marks, its their word against yours...and theirs always wins.
Are you getting the picture yet?
Read about the Stanford Prison experiment in case you still maintained rosy notions of the human nature of those given authority.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
I can pretty much say with some confidence that if you were hit with a device such as this
your attitude would likely change. Pain teaches very very quickly. It is likely you will
not simply stand there and let it happen again if you have been exposed to it's effects
already.
If I walked up and hit you with a Taser on a daily basis for a few days, would you simply
stand there and let me do it again knowing what was about to happen ? Doubtful. After one
or two applications, it would be likely we would be fighting the moment you saw the device
from that point on.
You may find yourself doing whatever it took to keep it from happening again. If that meant
resorting to deadly force and / or using a firearm, so be it.
But this is not true. Torture relies just as much on fear of death or permanent injury as it does on pain. I do not believe a pain-only device would make an effective torture device. Read a book like Bravo-Two-Zero, for an idea of what the torture was like practiced by Iraqis against coalition POW's in the first Iraq war; and more importantly, what the men who are able to resist it are like. They said they tested it on "hardened marines," and they couldn't withstand it more than a couple seconds. I'd like to see how Delta or SAS guys would do against it.