IT SOUNDS like the screenplay for a tawdry horror flick – corpses shot with plastic bullets, people zapped with microwave beams and others knocked out with volatile narcotic gels. But this is not Hollywood fiction. This is the reality of non-lethal weapons research.
At first glance, developing weapons that incapacitate without killing seems a worthy goal. But a worrying number of devices may not be quite as non-lethal as potential victims might hope for.
Take the Taser stun gun, which incapacitates its victims with a 50,000-volt shock and is widely used in the US. The trouble with the Taser is that…
