Slashdot Mirror
New Tech Puts the Brakes On Bullets Fired From Police Sidearms
Zothecula writes: Police officers are trained to shoot for the center of mass, not necessarily to kill, but to stop – although the end result can often be one and the same. "The Alternative" is designed to give officers a less lethal option in the form of a clip-on "air bag" for semiautomatic pistols that reduces the velocity of a standard round to make it less lethal. At the front of the bright orange carrier is a hollow sphere made of a proprietary alloy that catches the bullet and firmly embeds it as it leaves the barrel. The ball and bullet fuse, slowing the round by 80 percent. At this speed, the ball-encased round is less likely to penetrate flesh, but it will transfer enough kinetic energy across a wide surface to knock a suspect down with less chance of a lethal outcome.
They have demonstrated time and time again that they can't be trusted to do the right thing with them.
Hey, it sounds wonderful! It's less lethal, and in some imagined scenario it might be. In the real world, cops have to make split-second decisions to fire or hold fire. They don't have the luxury of time to analyze the threat. The device probably works as advertised - yet it will get cops killed. Does it alter way the semi-auto mechanism operates? Will that next round load, or will it jam? Will the slide lock in battery or just slightly open so the weapon won't fire? No thanks.
Converting a lethal weapon in to a less than lethal is situation ripe for accidental shootings and abuse.What happens if a cop accidentally shoots twice? It gives bad cops plausible deniability, and I haven't seen any evidence that this would be more effective than, or more importantly faster to deploy then a taser.
Some 'air bag' that is only good for the first round? Yeah, OK...you go with that. You might even make a substantial amount of money selling to some city.
The police won't use it (and I don't blame them), but this is worse than useless.
How will this knock them down if the bare bullet won't knock them down? Same kinetic energy, and it's been proven more than a few times that a bullet hitting a human does NOT have enough energy to knock them down, all gun-related movie and TV tropes notwithstanding.
http://www.forcenecessary.com/...
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
1) Police already have better non-lethal options, such as tasers and beanbag rounds.
2) Police are trained to fire multiple times if they have to shoot at all.
3) If it's not fatal, it's not as effective at stopping, and sometimes, stopping someone is all that matter. If it's on all the time, it wastes a precious second or two when it counts. If it's not, it will never be used at all.
4) Isn't an orange tip to the barrel an indication it's a toy gun?
5) It looks stupid.
This is stupid because a normal bullet doesn't even have the kinetic energy to knock over a person. That is all Hollywood make-believe.
There's a whole series of tests done on Mythbusters that debunked the concept.
So these bullets are going EVEN SLOWER than normal ones, and it's supposed to "knock down" a person?
Think about this: a typical 9mm round will be 115 grains or 124 grains in weight. One grain is 1/7000 of a pound. We're talking about a projectile going in the ballpark of 1000 fps that weighs only about 0.0177 pounds for the 124 grain bullet. There simply is no knock-down potential.
Now, on the other hand, if you are seriously injured by one of those projectiles, you'll probably fall over in pain. Or you might also just fall over dead.
what should happen is a separate weapon (maybe chambered in 10 mil??) with the LTL rounds to prevent "oops i fired a couple times too many" type things
Firing a bullet out of a gun at someone seems so much safer now.
----- obSig
Looks like some idiot an Gizmag was talked into doing an article by some hair brained inventor again. Neither party understands physics so they both think its great. As mentioned a few times here by others before me that firing a bullet into another ball isn't going to increase its knock down power (Conservation of momentum). The stupidity from there grows by training a law enforcement officer to use the gun as a first resort instead of a last one. Also for when lethal force is called for it means that the officer will have one less effective bullet and their follow up shots will be done with them dealing with the recoil from their first useless shot. Bad idea all around!
I don't want to do a sig now
Why not just use rubber bullets or baton rounds? The technology has been around since the 70s and you are not limited to one less-lethal shot. In fact rubber bullets seem like a far better idea - with this solution what happens if the first shot misses?
by a cop: if you are at the point where you are shooting someone, you shoot to kill. Period. Center mass is where your vitals are, and it's a relatively easy target since you can't really move it around like your head. BTW, "less than lethal" has come to mean "I can use this with relative impunity."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Just stop shooting people haphazardly.
The problem with "non-lethal" weapons is that when given to police, they tend to use them more often and with less provocation than with a firearm.
Look at how taser-happy the police have become- FFS, they'll tase you for just standing nearby watching what they're doing.
When I was growing up the police were much more reasonable and much less likely to go ballistic/aggressive when questioned...now if you dare to question them, out comes the pepper spray, baton, and taser. If that doesn't immediately make you "comply" (i.e. go away, stop watching, stop filming, whatever) out comes the gun and handcuffs.
I've seen it myself. Today's police officer has a gun (often 2 guns), a baton, a knife, a taser, pepper spray, steel-toed boots, a ballistic vest and a radio. And yet police today are the biggest pussies I've ever seen. They dress like extras from RoboCop and yet they're scared shitless and feel "threatened" by a teenager wearing a t-shirt and shorts. When did cops turn into such pants-wetting pussies? When did they become such chicken-shit cowards?
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
The nonsense portrayed on Hollywood and TV is false, a handgun bullet does not have enough momentum to knock a person down or even push their body backward, it's LESS than what the shooter feels as some momentum lost to air.
Now there are guns, that humans cannot hold, that can knock a person down (or blow them completely apart).
This "invention" is rubbish, is dangerous to cops and citizens who need protecting.
No, they are taught to shoot until the threat is stopped.
LEO haven't been using "clip" for ages, if they ever did. It's called a magazine. http://i70.photobucket.com/alb...
Looks like some idiot an Gizmag
-1: redundant
actually, I'm wrong. The criminals will be a victim of CAPITALISM if poor. White christian straight men can die, nobody gives a shit about them.
> it will transfer enough kinetic energy across a wide surface to knock a suspect down with less chance of a lethal outcome.
Does the recoil of a pistol knock th shooter down? No. Newton's third law tells us that the kinetic energy of the projectile is equal to the kinetic energy energy of the recoil. So the claim made in the summary is utter BS.
It IS enough kinetic energy to get your attention, however.
No, I merely dissociate the intend from the mean, which does all the difference in front of a jury. Shooting to kill is murder. Shooting to stop a threat is self-defense.
In this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... if the officers were trying to kill the perp, they would have finished him while he was on the ground. They didn't because they didn't *had to*, the threat was diffused.
No, they are taught to shoot until the threat is stopped.
Especially when the threat is running away from them.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
I bet you think that makes you less of a man wanna-be. Too bad you are wrong. How about you go finish your homework.
Unfortunately, there is evidence of Mike Brown's blood inside the cruiser, as well as powder residue on his hand / arm. Now, I guess you're gonna say that the blood splashed from 50 feet into the cruiser, and as did the powder residue on Mike's arm.
Funny thing about lethal weapons... they aren't always. Their lethality usually depends on where you are hit, with what, and how long until you receive medical treatment for your wounds.
Yes, death is a potential outcome of going up against a lethal weapons, that is a potential risk but not the desired result when using them... unless you are explicitly trying to kill. As a hunter I can go on at length of the ideal places to put a shot where it's not just about 'center of mass', but of trying to hit a deer heart which is about the size of my fist from 100 yards away. If I miss by even a few inches, I may be chasing the animal for hours.
Don't like it? Blame your creator for making sure that human vital organs happen to be in the easiest place to hit.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
For people, they are not going to risk the time necessary to put it on. Hm. Well maybe against a heavily impaired person - drunk, mentally challenged, etc. But no way against a person smart enough to recognize a gun.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
From the article: "but it will transfer enough kinetic energy across a wide surface to knock a suspect down"
Nope. If the bullet had enough kinetic energy to knock down the suspect, the gun would have enough kinetic energy to knock down the shooter. But of course it doesn't. Equal and opposite reaction. Conservation of momentum. Sir Isaac is rolling over in his grave. And I'm sure the coffin is counter-rotating. :)
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
AFAIK, science and the scientific community backs climate-change. So your point is acting against you. Science is good when it's about the US paying money to the rest of the world, but it's not good when it's proving that a black man was actually a criminal.
And almost certainly less accurate. That's the simple unfortunate truth of making a bullet slower. I'd rather not have the guys protecting us shooting less accurately than the other guy.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
There is plenty of places which will lead to a death. Hit any artery, and the target will bleed to death (that's why shooting the legs is a pretty terrible and stupid idea). What you want to target is a location which will sufficiently disrupt an attacker to stop the threat. The brain would be perfect, but it is relatively a relatively small target which is relatively well protected (bullet can bounce off the skull). So you also want a target will present a wide enough area to ensure at least one shot will work, thus the center-of-mass lung / heart area. However, given the bone structure in this area, multiple shot are pretty much mandatory, though, fortunately, LEO can use hollow-point ammo.
im arguing that the people who generally support BLM are generally the same who believe in climate change. as such they tend to be the ones who like to use "science" as their reason for believing in climate change. Very good
so why cant these people grasp that the science (GSR on his hand and arm, his blood in the patrol car) is right here???
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Or they can just load 1/2 power cowboy rounds for 1 and 2. The 3rd shot is full power. Or beanbag shots, or saltshot from a pistol. This is dumb.
They've basically invented an expensive, unreliable rubber bullet?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
ok, I missed you point, my bad. That's my exact stance.
really, they can't shoot a cow or something with this thing? Just some crappy video game footage?
That will get cops killed. If someone fires at them suddenly the cop is going to have to get off more than one shot to make sure they are not turned into a dead cop.
As anyone who has been through any type of self defense firearms training will tell you, aiming at the center of mass is simply a case of it being the largest target and easier to hit when things go to hell in a hand basket.
But cops empty the whole clip once they have an excuse. Show me a design that can hold enough for a whole clip and still fit in a holster,
then go suck on it.
If they said the impact of would knock them out, that's descriptive language. When you talk about kinetic energy over area, that's scientific language. Getting hit by the ball might smack you, stating that the application of kinetic force has a given effect implies that you're speaking of actual physical effects.
Every dead piece of shit is a victory for society. Why the fuck would we want them to live?
No, he definitely got that blood and powder burn when he was on his knees, arms splayed while he was screaming "Father why have you forsaken me?!". Then God gave him stigmata just before he was executed in full view of the whole black community.
At least according to his friend and race baiters.
while(1) attack(People.Sandy);
Cops are trained that if they're shooting they should shoot more than once.
Two kids with skateboards are a lethal threat to a single officer. Non-lethal weapons generally have major disadvantages against multiple opponents. If a cop knows what they are going to face ahead of time they can have the necessary tools ready, but if they knew that, they would be able to prevent crimes before they happened.
Yep, that's what I get for not verifying my formulas.
Note that my comparing it to a conventional beanbag round is by velocity, mass, and surface area, not energy.
Sometimes momentum matters 'more' than energy.
I don't read AC A human right
If a criminal had a gun and I had a gun how does my having a gun remove his? I suppose if I could do one of those truck shots like they do in the movies and shoot it out of his hands... Don't get me wrong, I'm opposed to gun control. Not because I think it's a bad idea but because of that kind of silly reasoning. The pro gun lobby is pretty unreasonable. They're single issue voters who throw away economic issues to cling to their gun based lifestyle. Bill Clinton noticed that and asked the democrats to back off on the issue so they could go back to winning elections and fixing the economy. Notice how Obama hasn't done anything on the issue?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I think this will just make thinking twice about pulling out your gun happen less often.
Twinstiq, game news
Wow, you completely and utterly missed the point. This discussion started when I said a gun shot won't knock a person down. I then described how you can know that even if you've never touched a gun. So calling me an idiot because I think it will simply demonstrates that you can't read .
The post you replied to was about the distinction between a literal description of an actual effect of physics (often signaled by phrases such as "kinetic energy" ) versus more artistic use of descriptive imagery that's not describing the actual physics (signaled by evocative words such as "impact" or "punch" rather than physics terms like "kinetic energy").
> One can almost think that you simplistic model doesn't apply if you direct the energy to a small part of the body that unlike the arms aren't flexible enough to dampen the force.
One can think that. One would be wrong.
First, no, the force of a punch rarely knocks someone down. What happens is that the force of a punch to the jaw rotates the skull quickly. The skull impacts the brain. The brain is controlling the legs. When the neurons in the brain misfire from the impact, the person falls due to gravity.
In a few cases, an attacker might launch their entire body weight toward the target. That might be enough force to knock someone down . Note that if the attacker/ tackler misses, THEY are likely to fall down. The very same force which might knock the target down remains with the attacker if they miss, and this equal force puts them down - without impacting a small part of their body a big part or any part.
Newton's laws DO start to break down near the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second.
No sidearms (or rifles) at all, like they do in many countries.
Get up!
Finally a weapon they can use on everyone. Normal guns are only for people who could arguably be suspects, and only if they are fleeing or trying to fumble out their papers as instructed. Tasers are at best suitable for men with raised hands. And of course for people in wheelchairs, for pregnant women and for school-aged children, provided these are not following instructions because they couldn't hear them or because they were confusing. That left a dangerous gap in the arsenal: toddlers, pregnant women with raised hands, unconscious diabetics, ... Torturing any of these with a taser generally leads to unfair consequences. (In some cases, officers were even sacked and had to move to a different city to find employment in their chosen vocation.) So there is a serious gap in the arsenal for customer management.
It's possible for a gun to kill the person it shoots. Therefore common gun safety says one may not point a gun at a person unless that person represents a threat that justifies lethal force. Cooper's Second Law of firearms safety: Never point a firearm at anything you are not willing to destroy.
If some bad guy is a threat, but not a lethal threat, the police office may not point a gun at the bad guy, let alone fire. If that bad guy is a lethal threat, then the police officer should be firing real bullets to end the threat.
In short there are no circumstances under which I would endorse pointing a lethal weapon at someone with the intent to use it non-lethally. Better to have two different weapons, one of which is considered to be guaranteed non-lethal. Oh look, we have tasers for that purpose.
Now, all that said, there are plenty of police officers out there who know better than me. Why, they are trained police officers and they don't need to abide by basic gun safety rules because they know what they are doing. I once had the dubious privilege of having MP5 muzzles pointed in my direction... I was in a room when a SWAT team showed how they do a dynamic entry. I gently chided the senior guy later about pointing real guns at people and he said "eh, they aren't loaded." (Cooper's First Law: All guns are always loaded.)
I read a first-person account from a guy who was erroneously reported to be "squatting" in an apartment. There was a problem with his apartment so the building superintendent told him he could sleep in an unused apartment temporarily. He woke up to find police pointing guns at him. This is unacceptable... they had total situational dominance, he was asleep and had no weapons, so they were not justified in pointing real guns at him. So again, Cooper's Four Laws may not be obeyed all the time in real life by real police. They should be, though.
P.S. I never thought about it this way before, but the phasers in Star Trek are dubious with respect to basic safety. If one failed to correctly set for stun, one might end up disintegrating someone by mistake. This would be fine for a military weapon: if most of the time you plan to use it to kill people, it's a mercy if it has another mode that is less-lethal. But for police and peaceful explorers, it's problematic to have a weapon that combines lethal and non-lethal functions.
I guess it would be okay for phasers to have dual modes if it took a special action to set a phaser into lethal mode, like holding down two red buttons with your off hand while firing. But per canon it was just a thumbwheel setting to switch between "stun" and "lethal" and Kirk was always reminding people to make sure they were set on stun.
http://www.startrekpropauthority.com/2008/04/rare-photos-of-greg-jein-tos-hero-type.html
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
This is a fucking retarded solution in search of a problem that will result in injured or dead cops. Use a firearm as it was intended, safety off (or no safety), fully loaded, one in the chamber, that you draw from your holster as-is so you can shoot as many bullets as it takes to terminate the threat to you or to another, which generally results in a fatality.
Better yet, if you don't want to be shot/killed by the police, then don't do anything that would justify a police officer using deadly physical thought.
I hope whoever invented this idiotic idea gets sued for everything when one of these devices fucks up and ends up getting someone killed because some poor cop was trained to use this piece of shit first. In deadly situations, you don't have the luxury of additional time to modify your weapon in a manner which it was not designed.
How does blunting one help when they are trained to empty
the weapon and then reload.
Does not pass this mans sniff test!
I call it BS.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
make you a deal, we'll issue these 'bitch-slap' bullets to cops just as soon as every criminal is forced to use the same wimpy bullets.
It will become very hard to find people to go into dangerous situations with these kinder, more-friendly, bullets.
Ken
Wouldn't it be simpler to just take the guns away from the police. They have demonstrated that they do not have the restraint necessary to use deadly weapons. They should be limited to the pepper spray and batons.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.