[extropy-chat] fanatic anxietist

[Adrian Tymes]

--- Mike Lorrey <mlorrey at yahoo.com> wrote:
> --- Adrian Tymes <wingcat at pacbell.net> wrote:
> > Because, much as they have been discussed and are under
> development,
> > there aren't any field-ready EMP guns yet.  Not even for the
> military
> > (which accepts reliability as low as the Patriot anti-missile
> > system), and certainly not for law enforcement.
> 
> Actually, HERF and EMP guns have been demonstrated in the past and
> are
> quite capable. The problem is the same morons who live in paranoid
> fear
> of power lines and wall outlets get OSHA to kill the funding,
> claiming
> that killing a cars circuits would create an obstacle to traffic,
> causing greater risk of accidents, and that bombarding the occupants
> with high energy EM energy is a health hazard...

It's debatable (and a debate I'd rather not get into) whether the
demonstrations were indeed effective.  The most I've personally heard
of is that a HERF gun managed to make a car run roughly from about 10
yards away; even the video cameras running inside the car to record
things were unaffected.

Regardless of whether it's effectiveness or just killed funding (which
wouldn't affect private, no-government-money, startup-secret
development: OSHA can't regulate what it doesn't know about, and small
companies - being smaller groups of people - can sometimes keep secrets
better than most government organizations), the fact remains that there
is no factory out there that's currently producing EMP guns, nor has
there ever been one, ergo EMP guns are not currently available to the
police.