Energy weapons as civilian weapons?

[Aaron MkII]

Hmm...never heard that about frangible ammo before, and yeah that's not good. Do you have any links?

[Sky Captain]

What would be cool is some kind of taser "dart gun." Something like a automatic-action gun with 30 round magazines of pen-sized taser darts with a short duration immobilizing shock. When the shock runs out, just shoot them again. Repeat until police arrive. I don't know how small you could make something like that with the required voltage and wavelength.

More like repeat until they soon die. You could most likely make that right now if you wanted to pay for some very expensive ammunition. It'd also be a good way to kill the target every time. Any idea based on incapacitating someone for a significant period of time with electrical pulses is really a non starter. Successive bursts rapidly increase the risk of heart failure, in almost all of the hundreds of documented taser deaths involve multiple shocks in a short period.

Why would you need to incapacitate someone for prolonged time? All you would want is to incapacitate suspect just long enough to put on handcuffs and arrest him.

[PhilosopherOfSorts]

What would be cool is some kind of taser "dart gun." Something like a automatic-action gun with 30 round magazines of pen-sized taser darts with a short duration immobilizing shock. When the shock runs out, just shoot them again. Repeat until police arrive. I don't know how small you could make something like that with the required voltage and wavelength.

More like repeat until they soon die. You could most likely make that right now if you wanted to pay for some very expensive ammunition. It'd also be a good way to kill the target every time. Any idea based on incapacitating someone for a significant period of time with electrical pulses is really a non starter. Successive bursts rapidly increase the risk of heart failure, in almost all of the hundreds of documented taser deaths involve multiple shocks in a short period.

Why would you need to incapacitate someone for prolonged time? All you would want is to incapacitate suspect just long enough to put on handcuffs and arrest him.

Because most people don't have handcuffs and can't arrest others? The scenario isn't a police officer using this thing to subdue a suspect, its Joe Civilian using it to stop a home invasion. You still don't want to subjecting the burgler to repeated electric shocks, but you just might want to do something to keep him down till the cops get there.

[Sea Skimmer]

Why would you need to incapacitate someone for prolonged time? All you would want is to incapacitate suspect just long enough to put on handcuffs and arrest him.

Did you just miss the part about wait until the police arrive? Also, you can't handcuff someone while they are being tased in the first place unless you want to tase yourself or you have some thick rubber gloves as insulators.

[TheFeniX]

More like repeat until they soon die.

Good point that I completely spaced on. You could have a second mechanism that fired a standard controllable taser powered by the Taser frame itself. Use the small "darts" to get the target immobile, fire the standard wired taser while they're down and only shock if they try to fight back. This would be a pretty complicated system to use.

Hmm...never heard that about frangible ammo before, and yeah that's not good. Do you have any links?

It's been a few years since frangibles hit the self-defense scene as some kind of "magic bullet," even though they aren't that new of a round and they were designed to make "live fire" scenarios less dangerous by reducing penetration and ricochets/shrapnel. They aren't really a self-defense round.

My comment about squib loads is anecdotal as there was a lot of talk on numerous forums around.... 2006? It's been so long. Anyway, Glasers were getting talked around a lot (basically a pistol round with bird-shot in it) as the "new" technology in self-defense. I dug around on numerous forums, sites, and more than a few shooters were complaining about the ammo being pretty poor performance-wise and extremely expensive to test. Other reports were that some bullets were fragmenting before even leaving the barrel, but like I said: it's not something I can back up.

The problem a lot of people don't realize is that you cannot make a bullet that will consistently stop a man-sized target that won't penetrate 6+ panels of sheetrock. Ammo like bird shot can't be counted on to penetrate a heavy coat, much less a person. Hell, It looks like Glasers don't even cut down on over-penetration.

[Aaron MkII]

Thanks anyways, I was primarily interested in the squid load problem but I'm going to have a chat with my buddy who swears by glasers.

[His Divine Shadow]

.223 soft points or HPs are pretty much the best for not penetrating drywall, better than buckshot. Simple and tested round/concept too.