Get fired upon and instantaneously be rendered unconscious by the Department of Defense’s newest non-lethal, but beefed up, stun gun.
This Nano-second Electrical Pulse Stun Gun (nsEP) is one of several projects that the Department of Defense showcased on June 22 at the Non-Lethal Weapons Industry Day in Quantico, Virginia.
It is in the early prototype stages, per the Pentagon’s PDF, and the nsEP gun is currently being tested on animals (ouch) to see if it will be safe for human utilization. They say the Nanosecond Electrical Pulses (nsEP) have the potential to cause a non-lethal disabling effect, and that the electrical parameters bring about durations of hundreds of nanosecond and peak potentials of tens of kilovolts under load.
What this means is that the government enforcement agent carrying one of these stun gun whoppers will be able to direct hundreds of volts of more powerful electricity than your standard stunner at a human being for fractions of a second so that they are incapacitated but not permanently damaged (as Darth Vader would say).
The Pentagon has plenty of lethal weapons on file, so they are now looking into the non-lethal variety. The new pulse gun is a lightweight device supposed to be an improvement over the existing — and often limited — stun guns, says Defense News.
Forget the current stunners (that have run rampant in the attack on Occupy Wall Street camps), because those allow the victim to recover as soon as the electricity stops zapping. The nsEP stun gun will render that enemy (activist?) unconscious for several minutes, making detainment far easier than it is right now. Having worked with high voltage electricity before, this sounds like it hurts (but I could be wrong).
The evolution of weapons never ceases to amaze.
[via Wired]
