![]() A 2017 review in the British Medical Journal found that 15% of patients treated for injuries from “nonlethal” projectiles suffered permanent damage and 3% died. Pepper spray aggravates pain receptors but is relatively harmless and usually has no lasting effect inflicting the same level of pain with blunt impact is far more damaging. Highly motivated individuals can withstand extreme pain - organizations like the Marine Corps train recruits to punch, kick and fight through despite the agony of being pepper sprayed (video here). The problem is that the more determined someone is, the more pain you have to inflict to stop them. A rubber bullet is a pain compliance weapon: it relies on inflicting enough suffering on someone to deter them from a course of action, such as throwing stones. Hence, the effects of a new design are unknown until it is tried.īut the main problem is even more basic. The Pentagon’s Joint Intermediate Force Capabilities Office (formerly the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate) has been working on computer models to predict the effects of rubber bullets for decades but it is still a work in progress. For one, to keep a bullet from breaking the sound barrier 1,100 feet per second at sea level. “Good scientific data are sparse and non-reproducible, often anecdotal…the level of pain, and thus the incapacitation of the target as a function of the impact condition, cannot be evaluated,” concludes one study. Subsonic bullets and fairly large-caliber war rifles, on the other hand, don’t mix very well. There simply is not enough data to base a design on. Information on blunt trauma weapons is empirical, meaning it is based on experience in the field and limited animal tests. One problem is that there is no good way to assess the safety and effectiveness of impact you cannot simply fire rubber at test subjects and see what happens. Alternatively, you can also minimise your chances of detection by using subsonic sniper rounds. To date, none of these has produced a projectile proven to be both effective and safe. ![]() The French Army is testing a round made out of SmartMetal, a lightweight aluminum foam that crumples and absorbs energy when it hits to cause less damage. Army’s 40mm Sponge Grenade fired from a grenade launcher (note the harmless-sounding name again), the British Attenuating Energy Projectile, flexible projectiles with multiple arms, or frangible rounds that shatter on impact. Solutions have typically involved softer projectiles which flatten out on impact, like the U.S. The challenge is creating a projectile which has a high velocity on launch, so it has a long range and flat trajectory, and which hits the target hard enough to have a deterrent effect - but does not travel so fast that it causes serious injury. The intervening years have seen many efforts to make baton rounds less dangerous.
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