I was actually hoping for a legitimate answer - something along the lines of “needs to recharge” or something, but I suppose this is in the “let’s never speak of it again” camp, ala “The Picard Maneuver” or “I can transport to the bridge in one second, but I’m going to walk quickly down the hall and then take the turbolift instead.”
(This could be a first. Invent a ficticious poster named Smarmy Threadshitter, only to have everyone agree with him instead of you. :D)
I still want to know what happened to the “stun grenades” from Enterprise. So useful!
OK… but I distinctly remember that in at least one TOS episode, the phasers had a wide-angle dispersion stun setting (which was conveniently forgotten forever after).
Tuvok used a wide-angle stun to knock out the entire bridge crew in one episode of Voyager.
Yeah, but a phaser isn’t an automatic weapon- it’s a beam weapon. It’s analogous to having a flashlight and shining it on a crowd, except that instead of lighting up the people, you’re phasering them.
I dunno if this would be considered “canon”, but the phasers in Star Trek games all have limited charges. Depending on which power setting you use, they usually only last a little while before needing to be recharged.
Maybe, when they used it to melt rocks, it was on a low-power, long-lasting setting that would slowly heat up the entire rock instead of shooting a small hole through it?
There’s a very simple and logical reason why all the useful weapons are taken away quickly, and why the security forces are untrained wimps.
Starfleet is the Federation’s solution for population control. Surely you’ve noticed that Earth, Vulcan, and all of the other homeworlds have suspiciously few large cities. It’s because all of their surplus people are off on distant worlds having their brains sucked out or getting violated by sentient tar pits 
I’ve never actually seen an episode of Star Trek, but do their phasers actually shoot at the speed of light? I’m thinking of Star Wars where you can see the beam of light travel through the air.
The phasers tend to be more of a beam than a pulse like in Star Wars, but I 'd say no, the Phasers are somewhat slower too. That and sometimes they have people (Kirk, somewhat frequently) dodge them, but I guess they could just be responding to the sound of the person’s flexor tendon as they’re pulling the trigger or something.
Star Fleet Phasers actually shoot a beam that travels about as fast as a snapped rubber band. It’s a weird physics thing. You can dodge the beams. It also seems to be a part of the training that you cannot move the phaser or your arm until the beam stops emitting.
In the TOS episode Wink of an Eye, the Enterprise was invaded by aliens who existed in a hyperaccelerated time frame. One of them (Deela) easily dodged a phaser blast. From her time frame, it appeared to be moving in ultra-slow motion. If the phaser beam had been moving at the speed of light, this would not have been possible.
On the other hand, a ship’s phasers must presumably propagate at superluminal speeds, since they’re capable of hitting ships at warp speed.
Hey, I want to know whatever happened to the brilliant tactic known as “carrying a second weapon.” I couldn’t believe my eyes when a MACO got her gun knocked out of her hand so she pulled out a stick and beat the crap out of her opponent…
Perhaps in 300 years, infantry tactics have been largely forgotten. It’s not inconceivable that in an area when a ship in orbit can simply liquify Massachusetts from orbit, the skills and strategies of ground combat might be lost.
Soldiers today do not possess many of the skills that soldiers of 200, 500 or even 1000 years ago possessed. The majority of today’s soldiers have no hand-to-hand or hand-held weapon fighting skills at all, for instance, and would not know how to ride horses. It’s not inconceivable that the armed forces of 2300 AD could lose infantry tactics and skills entirely.
This is all bullshit of course because the REAL reason Star Trek people can’t shoot is the same reason Han Solo said he made the Kessel run in “Twelve parsecs” - they’re just making it up as they go. However, the most logical explanation to me seems to be that they just don’t have the skills anymore.
What they really need is a phaser based shotgun. Also, some of the video games used a phaser based grenade.
Yeah it is: they use it all the time and apparently have been all along.