Britain Bringing Out 'Sonic Gun' For Olympics Security

skipkent writes with news that Britain is planning to use high-tech, non-lethal sonic weapons to provide security at the Olympics this summer. The Ministry of Defense says they intend to use the devices primarily as giant loudspeakers. But if they find themselves in need of a way to disperse crowds, the weapons can project sound up to 150 decibels, causing physical pain within a few hundred meters. "It has been successfully used aboard ships to repel Somali pirates." The maximum range for alarms and warnings is 3km. "Police and military planners say they are preparing for a range of security threats at the Olympics including protesters trying to disrupt events and attacks using hijacked airliners."

Comments

the Olympics seems to be losing its purpose

[Trepidity]

The Olympics was supposed to be an event promoting amateur sports competition to solidify friendship and peace between nations.

Now we have:

1. Increasingly, highly paid professional athletes, not amateurs; and even the "amateurs" are often exceptionally well-funded and de-facto full-time athletes.

2. National pride of the host nation, where the Olympics is supposed to show off their greatness at least as much as promote any sort of friendship between nations (admittedly, this is an old trend, at least dating back to the 1936 Berlin Olympics).

3. Extensive commercialization of the entire event, with whole shady networks of construction/sponsorship/etc. deals, even extending to weird brand-exclusivity rules that would make it illegal for you to wear a shirt with the wrong logo.

4. Extensive security procedures and apparatus, which makes the event as a promotion of international friendship and peace fall a bit flat... peace under the watch of heavily militarized police is a pretty empty kind of peace.