Electricity is baaaad stuff to use on people. This is why cops generally don’t carry stun guns.
A jolt that would knock you on your can won’t slow me down at all.
A jolt that would lay me out like a sack of potatoes will only piss off Sandy Duncan on PCP.
A jolt that would stun the hell out of Sandy Duncan on PCP will stun me and leave ugly burns that I can sue about, and would fry and/or cause permanent nerve damage to… say, Michael Jackson. Not that anyone would notice.
And ghod forbid someone’s toddler got hit with the thing.
No, electicity no good. Bad. How about tranquilizer darts? Well, there’s the matter of dosage… in fact, dosage problems come across quite a bit like the electricity argument, above… with the added bonus that no one ever seized up and died on the spot from an allergic reaction to electricity. Be fun explaining that one to the plaintiff’s lawyer…
“Well, your honor, it was intended to be nonlethal. How did WE know he was violently allergic to that particular sedative? Oh, he wasn’t? He was, in fact, already drugged up with that particular sedative, or a similar one, for recreational reasons, and our tranking him just caused an overdose effect? Hey, wow, does that mean we aren’t legally liable for killing his ass?”
…no, I don’t think trank guns are a good idea.
This leaves the electrode billy club. It isn’t a new idea. However, it opens a can of worms, too. Keep in mind that a jolt that will knock Marilyn Manson on his skinny butt will simply irritate me. Any half-smart cop is going to know this.
…and a good, professional cop isn’t going to poke me with the thing. If he needs to use it, he’ll just whack me upside the chops with it.
But not all cops are good, professional persons. Some cops rather enjoy being jerks. Are you proposing that we provide them with an instrument of torture that MAY, at some point, also come in handy as a stunning weapon?
This leaves us with the problem of designing and building an electric billy club that can (a) hold and store a charge sufficient to carry out its electrical stun function, and (b) be shockproof enough to still function after Daryl Gates has used the thing to beat Rodney King’s head in.
This is not to even begin to address the sheer amount of crap some departments require their officers to pack around, while maintaining secure enough that the perps can’t just pluck it off your belt and murder you with it.
Man, if I was a cop, I’d just want two pairs of cuffs, a billy, and a gun. Period. If I can’t talk him down, and I can’t beat him down, then I really doubt that a stun gun or a phaser or that net launcher from “Predator II” is going to do me any damn good…