Less lethal weapons.
I understand why people are trying to innovate in "less lethal" self-defense tools, and I understand why there's a market.
I still think that the whole market is a dumb idea, and that everything that we carry for self-defense should either be a lethal weapon or a non-lethal weapon.
This might be the dumbest "less lethal" tool I've seen yet.
Basically, it's an attachment that you place over the slide of a firearm with a metal ball in front of it. You fire a bullet with propels the metal ball, and the metal ball is supposed to subdue the suspect. The only reason to use this is if the suspect isn't a deadly force threat.
So, the idea is that you point a gun and fire a live bullet at a person who isn't a deadly force threat. That metal ball clearly has to be designed to be easily detached; otherwise, it's just a barrel obstruction. How many cases are there going to be wherein and officer doesn't realize that the metal ball came off and discharges his service weapon and kills a suspect who he already deemed to be a non-deadly threat?
They're not going to carry their service weapons with this attachment. By the time the attachment is placed on the service weapon, the officer either has a suspect approaching, which allows the suspect to escalate to being a deadly threat; or, the suspect is running away. It's faster to deploy a taser than it is to fiddle around with this attachment, make sure that everything is in place, and fire.
Regardless, I think that the whole "less lethal" market is dangerous. I can't think of any language in any law regarding self-defense that has a middle ground between deadly force threats and non-deadly force threats.
If you shoot somebody with one of these "less lethal" tools, and that person wasn't a deadly force threat, and that person dies, the word "less" in front of the word "lethal" isn't gonna help you in court. Less lethal just means that you're aware that it is capable of lethality -- only less-so than using an actual bullet being fired out of an actual gun.