Monday, November 19, 2007

Non lethal weapons, aren't

I once noticed a discussion between people concerning the lethality of baseball bats. Is a baseball bat a lethal weapon? Police consider them as such when you intend to hit one of them with one, and a wise man once said: Bats are only non-lethal if you really know what you're doing, or haven't got a clue."

Tasers have often been brought up as the perfect alternative to guns, because anything that replaces a gun is often portrayed as ideal, and the bad sides are left out. If they're so ideal, why do cops still prefer guns over tasers and stun guns? Very simple, a taser is designed to stop somebody while causing minimal damage, where as a gun is designed to stop someone, period.

And Tasers are called "less-than-lethal" for a reason, they can kill somebody just as dead as a firearm could, and not always senior citizens either:

"(CNN) -- A 20-year-old man died Sunday after being shot with a taser device during a scuffle with a sheriff's deputy in Maryland, a spokeswoman for the Frederick County Sheriff's Office said."

And this isn't a senior citizen, this is a kid my age whose life has been cut short by a law enforcement tool that's supposed to be safe enough not to merit having it's use regulated.
And this isn't an isolated event, over a 150 people have died after being shot/hit with one of these weapons since June 2001 according to amnesty international.

Still people ask, why do you worry about that? You're obviously willing to kill somebody in order to save your own life?
Well, the chance of taking somebody else's life is only worth it if you actually save your own. I'm not about to get close to an armed assailant in an attempt to tazer him, and get stabbed in the process, or bludgeoned with previously mentioned lethal baseball bat.

I'm not going to fire two darts into him preying that they'll both penetrate his clothing without getting deflected, and carry six tazer guns just in case one of them fails, or there are several threats that need to be taken care off, thugs often work in pack in case you didn't know.

Opposed to all of these potential failures? A weapon which has been around for centuries, compact, easy to maintain, doesn't have batteries that run dry or leaking O-rings as found in canisters of pepper spray. A small double action revolver doesn't require any difficult training, nor that much practice if all you need to hit is but a couple of yards away (typical across-the-room distance) But learning to use it properly is inexpensive as ammunition is cheap and plentiful.

Using said revolver will alert the entire neighborhood that you're in trouble, and is likely to send any secondary threat running scared. And work it will, much more reliably than any electronic gizmo whose success depends close to entirely on what the thug happens to be wearing.

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