There have been no reported purchases or uses of tasers by the Afghan police or military, but at the height of the occupation, the country was often a testing ground for taser weapons, including new experimental devices, for use in policing and particularly “crowd control”. The Marines and the US Army appeared enthusiastic these “less-than-lethal” […]
[[SUMMARY / COMMENTS: A long article … “Media-friendly” weapons – such as Long Rannge Accoustic Devices LRADs) – are being tested for everyday policing and crowd control, and as uprisings around the world spread, the demand for nonlethal weapons is increasing. Tasers are one such weapon, in which the military and policing overlap. Unlike rubber […]
[[SUMMARY /COMMENTS: Bringing Afghanistan to your neighborhood police-force …. Drones for policing or border patrols? Why not? The ShadowHawk is a 50lb mini drone chopper that can be fitted with an XREP taser with the ability to fire four barbed electrodes that can be shot to a distance of 100 feet, delivering “neuromuscular incapacitation” to […]
[[SUMMARY /COMMENTS: UAV (“Unmanned Aerial Vehicle” or drone) used against insurgents in Afghanistan can incapacitate suspects from above – it was demonstrated by a police unit – the Montgomery County Sheriff’s office – and will be operational within a month. This shows the ties between military/policing in the USA. The ShadowHawk on show in is […]
[[SUMMARY / COMMENTS: “The Pentagon recently placed an order for a test batch of “Taser grenades,” a long-range electroshock projectile; the grenades, designed by Taser International under a $2.5 million contract, are a forty-millimeter Human Electro-Muscular Incapacitation (HEMI) projectile that is intended to stick to a target and deliver a series of intense electric shocks, […]
[[SUMMARY / COMMENTS: Marine commander says “nonlethal weapons could prevent civilian casualties and give Marines and soldiers the ability to better confront situations in which it isn’t clear whether lethal force is necessary”. Fine, BUT the experience is consistent: tasers escalate violence in crowd-control situations and are NOT an alternative to “lethal force”. Particularly worrying: […]
The London Telegraph report that Coalition forces in Afghanistan having been issued a newly-developed heat-ray gun to disperse crowds and repel enemies without injuring them. This “non-lethal weapon” is NOT A TASER PRODUCT. It causes an “intolerable heating sensation”…
“Electric-shock tasers are useful only at short range against small numbers of individuals, are not scalable, and can cause pain.” The taser doiesn’t pass the “rock-throwing distance”— about 100 metres, the range a weapon must have to afford the user protection against rock-throwers.
Taser “X-rail” developped for US military in Iraq and Afghanistan (very brief report from Taser International)
[[SUMMARY / COMMENTS: Mainly for potential investors: $1.8 million Military Contract Represents the Single Largest Order in Company History. TASER president, Tom Smith says: “It is exciting to see the United States military place an order of this size after seeing the weapon’s success over the last year in theaters such as Afghanistan and Iraq. […]