Jun 19 2007

Muggers Beware

Category: Friends,Kazakhstan,Personal,PicturesChrisM @ 1:03 pm

A friend came over this weekend, and showed us their new personal protection device.

The (small) mature section of my brain immediately thought the same thing as when I hear about people carrying knives or guns in an effort to protect themselves – there is always the possibility that someone will take your protection, and use it against you.

Although these devices are usually advertised as very effective “personal defense” weapons, many[attribution needed] security operators and martial arts experts genuinely doubt their effectiveness against determined and physically strong aggressors in a real melee combat situation and their value as a defense weapon in general.

They claim that electroshock weapons need much more continuous and uninterrupted contact time with one’s intended target than usually advertised, well above 5 seconds, to stop a determined assailant effectively, and that much time can be impossible to achieve against a physically superior or better trained opponent in close unarmed combat. They claim that in such an event, the likely outcome would probably be merely irritating the assailant and having the electroshock weapon broken, taken away, or used against oneself for retaliation, after giving its intended user a false sense of security and power.

Taken from the Wiki article on Electroshock Weapons

Then the rest of my brain kicked in and just said “cool”, it crackles, looks really cool, and has god knows how many kilovolts pulsing between its metal studs…

Bzzzzzzzzzz Taser

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