Tuesday, March 30, 2010

How It Works: Taser's Electrified Shotgun Slug

TASER XREP

Great article at Popular Science on the new Extended Range Electronic Projectile, or XREP.

Excerpt:

It’s midnight. You’re a cop patrolling the wrong side of town when you spot a mugging. The assailant is about 40 feet away, out of range of your stun gun. You shout, but he darts down an alley. It’s a dead end. The crook picks up a bottle, hurls it at your head, and makes a break for the street. You draw your gun.

And so goes the “capability gap,” one of the trickiest situations in law enforcement. For an officer in the field, this is a danger zone spanning 35 to 65 feet in which an assailant is beyond the range of Tasers and yet near enough to throw a deadly object, pushing an officer one step closer toward the use of deadly force. “Plain and simple, we need a less lethal option that works within throwing range,” says Sid Heal, a retired commander with the Los Angeles sheriff’s department and a consultant to the U.S. Department of Defense.

That’s where the Extended Range Electronic Projectile, or XREP, comes in. Unlike Taser’s conventional stun gun, which shoots tethered probes up to 35 feet to deliver an incapacitating jolt, the company’s new XREP is a 12-gauge wireless projectile that can be fired up to 100 feet from any pump-action shotgun. It sails through the air like a normal slug yet induces muscle paralysis on impact. “It takes everything that’s a Taser and puts it in a slug-like device,” Heal says.

Head over to Popular Science to read the rest.

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