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New Rifle Tech Offers Variable Muzzle Speed
Ponca City, We love you writes "A gun that fires variable-speed bullets that can be set to kill, wound, or just inflict a bruise is being built by a Lund and Company Invention, a toy design studio that makes toy rockets powered by burning hydrogen obtained by electrolyzing water. The company is being funded by the US Army to adapt the technology to fire bullets instead. The new weapon, called the Variable Velocity Weapon System or VWS, lets the soldier use the same rifle for crowd control and combat, by altering the muzzle velocity. It could be loaded with 'rubber bullets' designed only to deliver blunt impacts on a person, full-speed lethal rounds, or projectiles somewhere between the two. Bruce Lund, the company's CEO, says the gun works by mixing a liquid or gaseous fuel with air in a combustion chamber behind the bullet. This determines the explosive capability of the propellant and consequently the velocity of the bullet. 'Projectile velocity varies from non-lethal at 10 meters, to lethal at 100 meters or more, as desired,' says Lund. The existing VWS design is a .50 caliber (12.7 mm) rifle weapon, but Lund says the technology can be scaled to any size, 'handgun to Howitzer.'"
Great, a rifle with a stun setting!
I would not want to be the guy that tests the low setting (or the high one for that matter) to make sure it isn't fatal!
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
So... hopefully no one forgets to flip the switch from kill to stun.
We had those growing up -- we called them BB guns.
4 pumps would not hurt a girl.
10 pumps to use on family members.
15 pumps for neighbor's kids
20 pumps for the kill.
Seriously though, I shudder with all of the implications of "nonlethal" technology in police hands. It rapidly leads to overuse. Remember the bean bag to the head that killed the girl celebrating the Red Sox victory? The current rash of taser (over)use?
Slashdotter, ID #101. UIDs are in binary, right?
While this may seem like a great idea, I think the concept encourages the use of weapons in crowd control more. When that weapon used in crowd control can become lethal through carelessness, you're just waiting for disaster.
There have to be better means of crowd supression rather than using weapons that can be lethal.
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Seems appropriate: safe non-lethal weapons are pretty much science fiction.
Blank until
More 'non-lethal' force options - to use against 'undesirable' expressions by the domestic populations of 'liberal democracies' - that have lawfully assembled against the wishes of their 'representatives'.
This is worse than the sub-harmonic puke-ray, or the microwave brain-fryer.
Welcome to the movie, "Brazil."
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Opps, my bad
I thought I had it on stun...
Im a gamer, not a grammer major. This post is full of spelling and grammer mistakes.
It seems to me that having such a variable weapon option will empower a future officer or national guardsman to exercise a bit less restraint when engaging criminals or rioters (specifically peaceful ones). I can already hear in my head the following court defence: "Well, see your honour...The gun was set to crowd control. Not to kill. So it really was not my fault right?" When you point a weapon at someone, you have to be conscious of the fact that that individual could die. Anyone with gun training know that, or should anyway. I feel very uncomfortable with people relaxing that view. I know they mentioned the Army was interested, but I am just looking forward into future issues. Just my two cents...
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if you're in a situation where you need a gun, do you honestly have time during your reaction to mess with setting it once it gets so fancy? good grief, you'll be fussing with the interface and making up your mind while your attacker prevails.
~WBGG~ "And I'm so sad like a good book I can't put this Day Back a sorta fairytale with you" ~Tori Amos
I'm sure they were given the whole 'you will be helping to secure America' bullshit / assuaging.
Much more likely they were given the whole 'you will be given a whole heap of money' line.
I think the point of this rifle is to make it legal to use for croud control.
So we aim at you, you don't know what comes out it's other end
G
With such a weapon the supposed target would never be able to distinguish between lethal and non-lethal attacks, and any mistake can turn out deadly -- you will either have a cop unknowingly shooting lethal bullets, or fleeing person returning fire with a regular gun, believing that cops are trying to kill him. Or both at the same time. The right thing to do is to go into the opposite direction -- making lethal and non-lethal weapons so different that it will be impossible to take one for another even from a distance. Like the difference that exists now between a gun and a club, or between uniforms and equipment of soldiers (who always shoot to kill) and riot police (that is expected to never use anything deadly).
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
So essentially it's a fancy potato launcher?
I don't have a link to the story, but the old lady was in a wheelchair. She had no weapons. The policeman hit her with a taser because she was upset.
Honestly, I think that the police need to be held to account for EVERY use of their weapons, lethal or otherwise. They account for every bullet. They should have to account for every taser zap, and there should be a commission of citizens that judge cases of police misconduct in every precinct, the way some do now.
Liquid and gas-propelled projectiles are not new and have been used in a variety of weapons for over ninety years. The drawback to this scheme is hydrogen's energy density. It is not even remotely close to single or double-base smokeless propellants. This is unlikely to go anywhere.
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
-- Pablo Picasso
That's because "non-lethal" is a fallacy. Anything can be used to kill if you use it in a certain way. Why, "water" is just another word for "less-lethal acid".
Do not aim your rifle at anything you do not intend to kill. All it would take is a misfire or accidentally putting it on the wrong setting and you've got brains splattered everywhere. I don't think these fascists thought this the whole way through. Then again, maybe they did :(
This technology really doesn't see best suited for hand weapons. A single external pack of liquid or gaseous propellant really doesn't seem like a good idea for an infantry weapon. At best it adds a further degree of complication to cleaning and maintaining the weapon, and at worst makes it more dangerous to use than current designs.
Police use? The money would be better spent on more training, I'd suspect.
Now a tank or naval gun might be a very interesting environment for a system like this. Because the propellant would be pumped separately from the projectile, shells would be smaller/lighter than conventional shells of a similar caliber. The autoloader could be smaller and lighter, thereby making the turret smaller. Likewise, it would be easier to compartmentalize the propellant separately from the fighting compartment. The tanks could conform to available space, taking up less interior room. Guns could fire in either a flat or arcing trajectory as well, making them more flexible.
The problem of having the propellant under pressure could be a serious fire hazard, of course...
Where the bullet strikes a person is just as large a determinate as muzzle energy in whether the wound is fatal or not.
I'm going to assume that the military is looking into this simply because they look into everything, not because they actually plan to deploy it. It's a terrible idea.
1. See the incident a few weeks ago where a soldier was firing machine gun blanks into a crowd during a demonstration. He swapped mags--but unfortunately, the fresh mag was not filled with blanks.
2. A tactical shooting instructor I once had, a cop, told us about the bean-bag shotgun he kept in his patrol car. The barrel was wrapped with blue tape, and there was a strict policy, as "leave without pay and a reprimand in your file", against ever loading it with anything other than beanbag rounds. In a crisis, if you grabbed the blue barrel, you had to be certain you would be firing beanbags, not lead.
3. When you point your gun at a person and pull the trigger, you must be very certain about what the gun will do. This adds a whole 'nother level of complexity to what should be a simple, reliable design. Not only will soldiers and cops inadvertently fire this thing on "kill" not "stun", but there's also a question of whether or not it will fire at all--just as bad if the cop needs to make a bad guy stop.
4. When a bad guy sees a gun pointed at him, he needs to be certain that if he doesn't do as he is told, he will die. I don't want bad guys to see this gun, and decide to take a gamble that it's only set to stun.
5. Americans have, and should have, a deep suspicion towards inappropriate force being exercised under color of law. The way to deal with this is through the Second Amendment, which properly exercised results in soldiers, cops, and civilians[1] regarding each other with mutual respect and caution. If you can't trust your military or police, the answer isn't to give them weak weapons--the answer is to disband them, by force if necessary, and organize trustworthy forces.
[1] NB: Technically, the police are civilians (see for example Robert Peel #7), but I hope this gets my point across. I wish I knew a word for "out of uniform, unbadged civilians", but nothing comes to mind.
In the wrong hands, sanity is a dangerous weapon.
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you buy m-16s, sniper rifles, and pistols because of the specialized applications - I don't buy the one size fits all thing - a pistol is about 2 lbs, and a sniper rifle is good out to a kilometer or so - I doubt anything can fill both roles. Regardless, soldiers want reliability - I wouldn't trust a single complicated device to save my bacon
I can think of at least 2 places, where the military might like to have a multi purpose gun, Iraq and Afghanistan, just toggle it to 'stun' and fire away without worries that it wasn't the right guy, if you need lethal force because they're firing back at you, then you can switch the setting while hiding behind a building.
I doubt the locals will grok the whole non-lethal thing - they'd be totally justified in trying to kill some asshole who's shooting at them. Hell, if a cop just started shooting at me, I'd assume he was trying to kill me and shoot back.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
the same group of people who enthusiastically defend peer-to-peer file-sharing because of its myriad legal uses condemn less-lethal weaponry because some (not all) police officers will use them unethically
Don't you think weaponry should be held to a higher standard of scrutiny than file sharing?
I mean, when P2P is misused, what's the worst that can happen? A copyright holder misses out on a few bucks that he may or may not have ever gotten anyway. He lives on to fight another day, and he can even sue the pirates for damages if he manages to track them them down.
If a police officer misuses "less-lethal" weaponry, however, someone ends up in the hospital -- or the morgue. His family might have some legal recourse, but that won't ease his suffering or bring him back from the dead.
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What do we need in between those two settings?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
Now, instead of "I didn't think it was loaded!", or "I thought the safety was on1", it will be "I thought it was on the non-fatal setting!". Better to keep standard guns and non-lethals completely separate IMHO just for simplicity's sake. An actual firearm (regardless of what you think is in the chamber or what safeties or settings you think are on) should always be treated as if loaded and ready to kill whatever it's pointed at. When people failed to do that, there are always consequences.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain