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Sound Generator Lethal From 10 Meters
penguinrecorder writes "The Thunder Generator uses a mixture of liquefied petroleum, cooking gas, and air to create explosions, which in turn generate shock waves capable of stunning people from 30 to 100 meters away. At that range, the weapon is relatively harmless, making people run in panic when they feel the sonic blast hitting their bodies. However, at less than ten meters, the Thunder Generator is capable of causing permanent damage or killing people."
Just firing a handgun without hearing protection is enough to rip out the hair cells in your ears (which don't grow back) and cause permanent hearing loss. I'm pretty sure that if this thing is capable of "stunning" people it's doing lasting damage to your auditory system. That damage may be small, but it remains that the ringing you hear in your ears afterward is still a set of frequencies you'll never hear again.
Sufficiently powerful shock waves can kill people!
Coming up next we ask an expert - what exactly is an explosion again?
Weather follows at 11.
"Don't Boom Me Bro!"
Yet again, OP gets it a little bit wrong, but in this case you can't blame the poster because TFA states it wrong as well. LPG is short for for Liquified Petroleum Gas, and it IS "cooking gas", it isn't "mixed with" cooking gas. Jeez. LPG is usually propane or butane or a mixture of them.
Having stated that, I will add my voice to what others have already posted: this device is a disaster waiting to happen. It has no place in "positive" enforcement scenarios. It might be useful as a self-defense weapon, but I question even that.
I think my friend Hotblack Desiato could do with a few of these for his rock band.
Things harmless at range can kill at contact distance. That's why some blind people with licenses to carry concealed handguns use blanks.
This is not the only sound based non-lethal weapon used by the IAF. They also use a device called The Scream, which emits a sound that causes disorientation and nausea. This one works at low, inaudible frequencies that vibrate the internal organs of the targets. There is also an high frequency version that is audible, that also produces a burning sensation on the skin (but does not produce any permanent damage).
I think they were also toying with using these types of weapons against the pirates in Somalia.
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
"Through sound and motion, you will be able to paralyze nerves, shatter bones, set fires, suffocate an enemy or burst his organs."
According to company data, the system generates 60 to 100 bursts per minute, each traveling at about 2,000 meters per second and lasting up to 300 milliseconds.
It is pretty impressive they can make a burst of sound move at six times the speed of sound.
In military parlance, "relatively harmless" means something different than what it does in the civilian world.
Dude, don't start it up. Those folks in Idaho are a thin skinned bunch.
The Idaho Potatoe Council, through their spokesman, Spuddy Buddy, want to reiterate that, "Potatoes don't kill people, people kill people."
"The potatoe is a non-lethal vegetable. In fact, there is only one tuber that is considered a weapon, but it is grown only in the upper most reaches of the Andeas on the boarders of Chile and Peru," Buddy went on to say.
Did you know millions of potatoes have been shipped around the world as humanitarian relief. Not a single one has been used in military agression. There has only been one instance of a potato being used to kill. That was the aforementioned Peruvian Murder Spud (rough translation) that the CIA used in an assasination attempt on the husband of Evita Peron.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I would love to mount one of these babies under the hood and use it as a killer car horn for those drivers who JUST. WON'T. MOVE. One blast from this thing and they'll never sit there texting at the green light again. Also handy for those clueless people who drive UNDER THE SPEED LIMIT in the leftmost lane. Can't take a hint? Can't see my lights flashing? Don't realize you're clogging up the expressway? BOOOOMMMMM. Imagine the satisfying feeling as they instinctively floor the accelerator while blood dribbles down from their ears! Ahhh.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
Because then the people who spent their resources on developing new ways to kill use those innovations on the people that didn't.
Nope.
Genocide is really rare. Invasion, colonization and assimilation is a lot more common.
Killing people is almost entirely pointless. Threatening to kill people is what does the job, because people happen to be wired in ways that let them be controlled up to a point by such threats. When the threat level becomes too high they always fight back, of course, because they happen to be wired that way, too.
Gandhi's big trick was to realize that death threats are not generally credible, and react accordingly, which means not allowing your behaviour to be controlled by threats, and being willing to die rather than submit. There are specific circumstances where that won't work at all--such as the Jews in Nazi Germany--but in almost all cases peaceful, active resistance is far more effective.
These weapons, as others here have pointed out, are aimed at Gandhi-style tactics: by having a non-lethal response to a peaceful, active resistance it tilts the tables back toward the oppressors, who are basically engaging in mass instantaneous public torture-at-a-distance via the use of these weapons.
These weapons are designed to generate compliance with the alpha chimp's wishes by engaging people's pain response rather than their fear response. The latter can be fairly easily subverted, depending as it does on a vague cognitive connection between threat and outcome. The former is much tougher nut to crack, although it'll be interesting to see the first time the cops are on the receiving end of one of these weapons, which will no-doubt be reduced to hand-held form factors in the next couple of years.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
I actually find this worrisome, from the standpoint of civil liberty. Non-violent protest actually relies on the brutality of governmental response to provoke sympathy and garner support for one's cause. While the so-called "non-lethal" weapons of today are still pretty brutal, I invite people to follow me on a little thought experiment that illustrates my concern.
Let's carry non-lethal crowd control methods to their ultimate conclusion. Imagine a device that lulls people to sleep, whereupon they're carried home, placed in their beds, enjoy a night's rest like the haven't managed in months, and awake to find a chocolate morsel on their nightstands and a terrifically refreshed sense of well-being. If crowds of peaceful protesters are broken up by repressive governments using this device, how much sympathy will that garner? How effective will civil disobedience be?
The scenario I describe is purposefully fanciful and exaggerated. Nevertheless, my point is that non-lethal methods carry the very real threat of keeping bad governments from looking all that bad. Government should hurt; and repressing civil disobedience should carry the risk of looking bad. Otherwise, you can be sure it will be used at the drop of a hat. And that may just pose a problem.
quiquid id est, timeo puellas et oscula dantes.
Yeah. This one goes to 11.
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.