The ray can be used as intended without killing people, so can bullets. Unless in the US you only sell bullets to people expressing a desire to use them for defence with lethal force, it is not even true to say that the purpose of a bullet is to kill. The purpose of a bullet is to be fired from a gun, at what that gun is pointing is immaterial to the bullet.

I see no difference in a non-lethal weapon that can be turned up to “kill” and a lethal weapon that can be turned down to “stun”, except perhaps efficacy.

MadCarlotta - 16 May 2008 06:13 AM

I once went to a party back when I sstill lived in Florida before I took off for NYC.

There was this creepy guy there who was some kind of ninja/martial arts nut. He had me dump my purse and showed me how I could kill someone with every item in there.

You can do terrible things to a person with a hairbrush! 

Yeah, hit them in the eyes with it, kick them in the balls, hit them over the head with a chair and ram it up their jacksie.

Renquist - 18 May 2008 06:36 AM

MadCarlotta - 16 May 2008 06:13 AM

I once went to a party back when I sstill lived in Florida before I took off for NYC.

There was this creepy guy there who was some kind of ninja/martial arts nut. He had me dump my purse and showed me how I could kill someone with every item in there.

You can do terrible things to a person with a hairbrush! 

Yeah, hit them in the eyes with it, kick them in the balls, hit them over the head with a chair and ram it up their jacksie.

You aren’t all that far off.

MadCarlotta - 18 May 2008 06:58 AM

Renquist - 18 May 2008 06:36 AM

MadCarlotta - 16 May 2008 06:13 AM

I once went to a party back when I sstill lived in Florida before I took off for NYC.

There was this creepy guy there who was some kind of ninja/martial arts nut. He had me dump my purse and showed me how I could kill someone with every item in there.

You can do terrible things to a person with a hairbrush! 

Yeah, hit them in the eyes with it, kick them in the balls, hit them over the head with a chair and ram it up their jacksie.

You aren’t all that far off.

I thought “If somebody was trying have a square go with me and there was a hairbrush sticking out of a girl’s bag on the bar, how would I best use it?“

Pure ninja instinct

Renquist - 18 May 2008 07:02 AM

MadCarlotta - 18 May 2008 06:58 AM

Renquist - 18 May 2008 06:36 AM

MadCarlotta - 16 May 2008 06:13 AM

I once went to a party back when I sstill lived in Florida before I took off for NYC.

There was this creepy guy there who was some kind of ninja/martial arts nut. He had me dump my purse and showed me how I could kill someone with every item in there.

You can do terrible things to a person with a hairbrush! 

I thought “If somebody was trying have a square go with me and there was a hairbrush sticking out of a girl’s bag on the bar, how would I best use it?“

Pure ninja instinct

Something tells me you may have some experience in that field… it would go great on a resume…

It goes great on the list of skills of a debonair gentleman adventurer.

David B. - 16 May 2008 02:55 PM

I see no difference in a non-lethal weapon that can be turned up to “kill” and a lethal weapon that can be turned down to “stun”, except perhaps efficacy.

Yes, the main difference would probably be in how well the thing worked comapared to other devices used for the same purpose.  You could probably add some extra wiring to a tazer to make it virtually certain to be a lethal weapon every time you use it, but it would be rather ineffective compared to other things that were designed right from the start to be lethal, such as a shotgun.  Setting up this electromagnetic ray thingy to be lethal could work, but doing so would end up being less effective than using something actually designed to be so, such as rockets or nerve gas or whatnot.

I strongly suspect that a number of ‘non-lethal’ weapons are just lethal weapons that didn’t turn out so well (they used to pull the same trick for CPUs, remember).

Middle Manager: Hey Burt, how’s the death ray coming along?

Lead Engineer: Not so good, Larry. The power requirements increase exponentially in step with power-to-target so we’re having problems breaching the neural destabilisation threshold. We’re stuck at neural desensification and going nowhere fast.

MM: You lost me after “the”...

LE: There’s no death in our death ray, Larry. The most it can manage is to knock people out.

MM: So we call it a “stun ray”. Nice one, Burt! I bet if we time our pitch to just after the next bunch of civilians get offed we can screw the Army boys into putting in an order for a thousand!

Interesting…“Non-Lethal ray designed to kill” kinda like a headline that reads “policeman shoots man with knife”

Hey, they make knife-guns…

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/gadgets/gun-hidden-in-a-knife-its-two-two-two-kills-in-one-219363.php

Ahdora - 08 September 2008 09:16 AM

Hey, they make knife-guns…

http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/gadgets/gun-hidden-in-a-knife-its-two-two-two-kills-in-one-219363.php

They’ve been making that sort of thing for hundreds of years.  Though admittedly that particular example you linked to is one of the more stupid ones I’ve seen.