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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.'"
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?
Yah, but at least there can be accountability with weapons like these. This is preferable to the agony ray that has no lasting physical effects, allowing cops/soldiers to plausibly deny using it to make some poor saps dance and scream for their amusement. What I'm worried about is a handheld version of that.
Eh, almost all manufacturers and professional groups in the US now refer to them as less-lethal not non-lethal. This is in acknowledgment that anything propelled by a non-trivial amount of powder has the power to kill, even bean bags and rubber bullets or tasers. You still don't point them at someone who is complying with the law and you only use them after other tactics have proven in-effective and there is a significant risk of injury to the officer or others. I don't think the VAST majority of officers are any more likely to pull their gun just because it has some half-assed stun setting, though I guess they might pull it in the same type of situation where they would pull a taser today, one less piece of equipment to carry.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Which means our military is increasingly seeing it's own populace as being the target, not an enemy nation.
It's even reflected in operation names. Used to be operation names were designed to mislead (or not lead, at least) the enemy should the enemy become aware of them - Operation Market Garden, Operation Overlord. The point was that the operation name was chosen with its impact on the target of that operation in mind.
Now we have names like "Operation Enduring Freedom."
Just who is the target of that name? Just who is it intended to mislead?
This space available.
You still don't point them at someone who is complying with the law...
Once you have enough laws you can point them at anyone.
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.
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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It's funny, but I just read this ON CNN.com. Obviously, one dude is not "all cops", but the really interesting part is the departmental response. Can you really wonder why the average citizen might hate/fear cops when the balance of power is so completely skewed, and it is obvious that cops protect their own? I mean, I can at least try to protect myself against the average asshole who assaults me, but not a cop. My word against his 2 cop buddies that he was illegally tazing me? Uh huh. And while you say you have never seen a cop behave inappropriately (and throw out some weak "we're too lazy to do the necessary paperwork" bullshit as a reason!), it's obvious some do. So every time I encounter a cop in a less than friendly setting, I am encountering an armed person that can kill or severely injure me and most likely get away with it. And any attempt to defend myself will, again most likely, screw up my life completely. And all I have to do is somehow piss off this stranger that is already predisposed to distrust and dislike me.
...sometimes, in order to hurt someone very badly, you have to tell that person terrible lies. - PA