Holy Cow! They built a 1920's-style ray gun!

[Tenebras]

Actually, I’d say that the whole “excruciating pain without any scarring or physical evidence” is exactly what’s so disturbing about this little machine. They don’t say in the article whether clothing blocks the radiation. Skin stops UV radiation as well, but as anyone who had been out in the hot sun in a thin or wet t-shirt can attest, cotton jersey is not necessarily up to the rigors of protecting from the radiation of the big ole fiery ball of gas I like to call the sun. Also, the people near the demonstration were apparently asked to remove their eyeglasses and contacts, so it’s possible this isn’t entirely benign.

Well, it’s possible it’s less benign than they are indicating.

As for setting a timer on the thing so that it shuts off after a few seconds, that’s a bit like saying “well, sure the thumbscrews hurt, but we only leave them on for a short time and we don’t tighten them enough to break the bones. Gosh!”

[Sunrazor]

[QUOTE=Tenebras]
As for setting a timer on the thing so that it shuts off after a few seconds, that’s a bit like saying “well, sure the thumbscrews hurt, but we only leave them on for a short time and we don’t tighten them enough to break the bones. Gosh!”
[/QUOTE]
Not even the least little bit like it. My response was in respect to the crowd control use, demonstrations of which I have seen. I’ve never seen it demonstrated as an individual torture device. Seems like a helluvalotta expense and bother, when a $20 cattle prod does the same thing.

When used as crowd control, however, it would be very effective in short bursts. Riot control focuses on breaking the single-mindedness of the crowd, force them to start thinking again (like, for instance, about how much fucking pain they’re in) and break the self-feeding cycle of mob outrage. I’m not really expressing this well, but maybe someone with training can weigh in on this. Bottom line is, it doesn’t take very long to dissuade a truly riotous crowd, but you have to dissuade large numbers of them all at once. This device would do that.

[LonesomePolecat]

[QUOTE=Miller]
It’s a gun that doesn’t kill or cause permanent injury. What am I supposed to be scared of?
[/QUOTE]
Well, its potential as an instrument of torture is obvious.* And I have to wonder if it could be modified to cause permanent injury or death.

*Not that there’s ever been any shortage of effective torture techniques, of course …

[Tenebras]

I would argue that the demonstration box used at the trade show is pretty close to the individual torture device model. Being able to simulate having your hand on fire for as long as you want seems a bit more versatile than just TASERing the person with your stun gun. “The pain will be over as soon as you tell us what we want to hear” and all that.

As for using it in short bursts, if it can only fire for 5 seconds and then has to cool down for 20 seconds you just invented the 18th century rifle-line. Of course, those guys had to try and decide whether to reload or set their bayonets depending on whether the opposing forces could close during their downtime. If you have a rioting crowd and you just zapped the front line (if it’s stopped by skin it’s certainly stopped by that guy standing in front of you) with a pain ray that you can’t fire again for 20 seconds, what’s to stop them from charging toward you instead of away?

If you mean that you’ll hit a button and it’ll fire for 3 or 5 seconds and then stop automatically, but if you hit the button again and it goes off again, you might as well just hold the button down for as long as you want it to fire without quantizing it.

[Miller]

[QUOTE=Belrix]
I just see massive opportunities for abuse. The real version of this, not the itty-bitty demonstration box, is an antenna mounted on a vehicle that can project pain for a half mile.

How long will it take the crowd to run the half-mile to escape this beam sweeping over them? How controlled must the operator be in order to not aim this a little extra long at the guy that threw a rock at him?
[/quote]

How controlable is, for example, tear gas? At least this device’s precision isn’t a function of prevailing winds.

It has the potential to inflict invisible damage on a thousand people at once. It’s only defendable attribute is that it doesn’t kill you.

Actually, it has two defendable attributes. One is that it doesn’t kill you. The other is, despite what you say in your first sentence, it doesn’t damage you, either.

This is a way to inflict disabling, intense, skin-flaying pain on somebody in a way that doesn’t leave evidence afterward.

Neither does waterboarding. Or stress positions, or sleep deprivation, or any number of other torture techniques that have been around for centuries. Not to mention, all of the torture techniques that leave permanent, debilitating injuries. If I had to choose between getting hit with this pain-ray, or being racked until all my joints dislocated, I’d go with the pain-ray, thank you very much.

Imaging if the Chinese had this gizmo during the Tiananmen Square riots of 1989.

You mean, as opposed to tanks? I imagine there’s have been quite a few Chinese students still alive, for one thing.

How 'bout a hand-held version to replace tasers? Want the police to have one? Want your abusive husband to have one?

I wouldn’t want my abusive husband to have a taser, either, but that doesn’t mean I’m losing sleep over their existence.

What if a portable one had be in Abu Ghraib prison?

What if it had? The Abu Ghraib abuses didn’t come to light because we noticed a bunch of suspicious bruises on Iraqi prisoners. We found out about it because the dumbfucks who did it, photographed themselves doing it and then showed the photos around. Frankly, if they had used a pain-ray on the prisoners, there’s an outside chance that the abuses there would have received the public outrage they should have, because it’s a lot harder to sell using a Klingon Agonizer on someone as a “frat prank” than is holding their head under water for a few seconds.

The potential for abuse of this device is just so extreme, it frightens me think it could be released into the wild, so to speak.

The problem with torture isn’t the devices used to commit it, it’s the existence of regimes willing to use torture, and the compliance of their populations in allowing it to continue. Until that problem is resolved, worrying about high-tech black boxes is kind of pointless, when a car battery and a couple jumper cables makes a perfectly effective torture devices.

[sturmhauke]

[QUOTE=Miller]
The problem with torture isn’t the devices used to commit it, it’s the existence of regimes willing to use torture, and the compliance of their populations in allowing it to continue. Until that problem is resolved, worrying about high-tech black boxes is kind of pointless, when a car battery and a couple jumper cables makes a perfectly effective torture devices.
[/QUOTE]

Hell, you can learn some easy pressure point techniques and torture someone with your bare hands if you’re so inclined. Technology is only as good or as bad as the people using it.

[MaxTheVool]

I’ll repeat what I said in this thread, which had more or less exactly the same bafflingly outraged responses…

@me

I gotta say, I don’t get where you’re coming from. It’s not like the military frequently captures bad guys, wants to torture them, racks their brain as to how to torture them, and reluctantly gives up after not coming up with a way to inflict pain.

And sure, it would be nice if the non-lethal weapon for crowd control was 100% guaranteed to be non-lethal. But if you were an Iraqi mom whose son was getting caught up in a mob and was going to be facing US troops, would you rather they had one of these or just good old machine guns?

The world already has plenty of weapons that can kill. It has plenty of torture devices and techniques that can inflict unbelievable agony, many without leaving a trace. There are a nearly limitless number of very cheap ways for a drunk abusive husband to kill his wife. What there are NOT many of is non-lethal ways to disperse angry mobs. Sure, it will allow evil totalitarian governments to disprse angry mobs of their citizens, but they can already do that with machine guns. I just. Don’t. Get. The. Outrage.

[Tenebras]

It’s because when the police/government get a new toy, they don’t use it instead of their old toys. They use it in addition to their old toys. For example, in Houston they got tasers so that they could use non-lethal force instead of shooting at people. What happened? Well, they shot the same number of people, but they used the tasers in all kinds of situations which would have been handled before without such force. Cite.

Instead, more than half of the Taser incidents escalated from relatively common police calls, such as traffic stops, disturbance and nuisance complaints, and reports of suspicious people.

In more than 350 cases, no crime was committed. No person was charged or the case was dropped by prosecutors or dismissed by judges and juries, according to the Houston Chronicle’s analysis of the first 900 police Taser incidents, which occurred between December 2004 and August 2006.

Of those people who were charged with crimes, most were accused of misdemeanors or nonviolent felonies.

900 people get tasered, 350 of them aren’t even charged with anything. The remaining 550 are charged mostly with misdemeanors and non-violent felonies. So around a third of the time somebody gets tasered, it turns out they weren’t gulity of anything. Why? Because it’s so easy and it’s non-lethal. You might as well. At the same time the police shot just as many people as they did before they got the tasers.

There’s always mission creep. And this little box o’ pain starts out it’s life as something that it’s hard not to abuse. How little do you have to creep?

[Tenebras]

Oh yeah, and also, I question this device’s effectiveness as a crowd control measure. Tear gas works by making an area uninhabitable, and also rendering more or less helpless all of the people effected by it. This device works on a line of sight basis, and temporarily incapacitates anybody in that line of sight. But does that really help disperse the crowd? In one situation you take out the front line people, and in another you blast everybody in the town square’s face with burning. What happens when you’re done zapping them? You just threw a couple of seconds of boiling water in the face of 10,000 people. Now what? They all leave in an orderly fashion? It seems like the best case is that you now have 10,000 panicked people instead of 10,000 angry people. Yay!

[Sapo]

[QUOTE=Miller]

Neither does waterboarding. Or stress positions, or sleep deprivation, or any number of other torture techniques that have been around for centuries. Not to mention, all of the torture techniques that leave permanent, debilitating injuries. If I had to choose between getting hit with this pain-ray, or being racked until all my joints dislocated, I’d go with the pain-ray, thank you very much.

[/QUOTE]

And this is basically the bottom line of the whole discussion. I just cannot think of any method of torture that I would choose to have inflicted on me over this one.

But let’s not focus too much on how it can be abused. You can bludgeon people to death with blueberry muffins, if you feel so inclined. Everything can be abused. Let’s look at its effectiveness as a method of mob dispersal.

All the alternatives I can think of from the top of my head, have some cleanup associated. Tear gas, pressure hoses, rubber bullets, they all leave something after their desired effect is accomplished. Not the pain ray. You flick it off, and the world is as it was. No treating the wounded, no messes to pick up, no gases to dissipate.

Also, once the offenders comply, its effects are over. If you fire a gas canister, the rioters can give up at the next second, but you have no way to get the gas back in the canister. It keeps pouring out until it is all burnt out and then you still have to wait until it dissipates, with the gas being equally noxious for the duration, affecting friend and foe alike.

[sturmhauke]

I think it’s more valid to compare the pain ray to rubber bullets.

http://www.mindfully.org/Health/2002/Rubber-Bullets-Israeli-Arab25may02.htm
This study goes into detail about some serious injuries and deaths that can occur. (About halfway down the page is a picture that may be NSFW; it shows a man’s back and part of his butt that have sustained rubber bullet wounds.)

[sturmhauke]

That was mostly in response to Tenebras BTW.

[Sapo]

How wide is the Cone of Pain ™ of this machine? Do you have to aim at people or is it more of an area effect?

[Baldwin]

[QUOTE=Sapo]
In defense of this wonderful little machine of torture, the pain stops immediately after you switch it off. All the other sources of pain keep hurting after stopped and cause lasting damage. Here, the minute you cry “uncle!”, the pain stops. Try to get cute, and it is back on in full force. I am thinking that even the stupidest out there would be trainable with this, and after they are trained, they are not ruined.
[/QUOTE]
Curious: under exactly what circumstances do you think it’s all right for somebody in authority to “train” another human being in this way – using excruciating pain as negative reinforcement to condition behavior?

(I’m assuming you’re talking about humans, and specifically adult humans, not animals or children. Bad idea in any case. With animals, it would be entirely the wrong way to train them, and with a human being, because of that darn brain, the results would be very unreliable. In my case, it would mean that, as soon as possible, I’d kill my “trainer”.)

[muldoonthief]

[QUOTE=Tenebras]
It’s because when the police/government get a new toy, they don’t use it instead of their old toys. They use it in addition to their old toys. For example, in Houston they got tasers so that they could use non-lethal force instead of shooting at people. What happened? Well, they shot the same number of people, but they used the tasers in all kinds of situations which would have been handled before without such force. Cite.

900 people get tasered, 350 of them aren’t even charged with anything. The remaining 550 are charged mostly with misdemeanors and non-violent felonies. So around a third of the time somebody gets tasered, it turns out they weren’t gulity of anything. Why? Because it’s so easy and it’s non-lethal. You might as well. At the same time the police shot just as many people as they did before they got the tasers.

There’s always mission creep. And this little box o’ pain starts out it’s life as something that it’s hard not to abuse. How little do you have to creep?
[/QUOTE]

I haven’t seen any of the LEOs on the board in this thread, but I never thought tasers were supposed to be used instead of lethal force. There’s a really narrow window between “lethal force justified” and “lethal force required”, and that’s where a taser would fit in - if someone is pointing a pistol at someone else, it’s safer for the potential victim if you shoot the gunman with an actual firearm, not with a taser. I thought tasers were designed for non-lethal but still dangerous situations - a drunk starts swinging punches, or something like that. In that case, it’s better for everyone if he gets tased, rather than having a few cops beat him with their nightsticks.

[Sapo]

[QUOTE=Baldwin]
Curious: under exactly what circumstances do you think it’s all right for somebody in authority to “train” another human being in this way – using excruciating pain as negative reinforcement to condition behavior?

[/QUOTE]

Yes, for adult humans, of the active rioter kind. Several have voiced concern that once you turn the corner, you are out of reach of the ray and free to regroup and attack again. I am saying that -after enough of these encounters attack, get rayed, flee, regroup, repeat- they might get the idea that facing the authorities this way is not the way to go. Heck, even worked for me just this week, right here.

[cmyk]

HA! I laugh at your 2000s Style Pain Rays. That is, my Faraday Mesh lined body suit and I do.

BOOJAH!

[Tenebras]

Actually Sapo, nobody is saying “this is a bad crowd control device because you can just walk around the corner and be done with it.” People are saying “this is a torture box in search of a legitimate purpose.”

[shijinn]

[QUOTE=Miller]
… Neither does waterboarding. Or stress positions, or sleep deprivation, or any number of other torture techniques that have been around for centuries. Not to mention, all of the torture techniques that leave permanent, debilitating injuries. If I had to choose between getting hit with this pain-ray, or being racked until all my joints dislocated, I’d go with the pain-ray, thank you very much. …
[/QUOTE]
what if your torturers strapped you down, turned on the machine and went home for the weekend? what does it do to people who’s roasted for days on end without death to end it? is it really certain that there will be no permanent harm, physically and mentally?

@Hanlon article

… I try it again. It is a bit like touching a red-hot wire, but there is no heat, only the sensation of heat. There is no burn mark or blister. … But anyone in the beam’s path will feel, over their entire body, the agonising sensation I’ve just felt on my fingertip. The prospect doesn’t bear thinking about. …

[MaxTheVool]

[QUOTE=shijinn]
what if your torturers strapped you down, turned on the machine and went home for the weekend? what does it do to people who’s roasted for days on end without death to end it? is it really certain that there will be no permanent harm, physically and mentally?
[/QUOTE]

I just don’t get this response. I will repeat myself from upthread: “I gotta say, I don’t get where you’re coming from. It’s not like the military frequently captures bad guys, wants to torture them, racks their brain as to how to torture them, and reluctantly gives up after not coming up with a way to inflict pain.”
It is already the case that there are situations in which people in power (the military, police) are confronted by large mobs and with to disperse those mobs without causing loss of life. Currently they use things like tear gas, rubber bullets and firehoses. This new device may be better equipped for that purpose than other devices. Or it may not. In any case, I expect that the people who are in charge of said dispersal will get it a shot and evaluate it.

The fact that one might imagine this device also being used for torture or spousal abuse is fairly irrelevant to me, because there are already PLENTY of ways to torture and spousally abuse people, and there being one more isn’t going to appreciably affect the amount of torture/spousal abuse that goes on.
And I will repeat one earlier question: if you are an Iraqi mother and your son is going to be out in the streets in mobs protesting against the imperialistic American running dog swine invaders, would you rather that this device exist or not exist?