130 db can cause almost instantaneous permanent hearing damage. Seems a bit extreme for crowd control.
You need something like 125 dB just to induce pain. And that’s pretty much the point of these. And it’s conventionally about 140 dB that’s hearing unsafe.
…It’s a mistake we were making…Kate Bush
The horn on my motorcycle is 135dB, and I’m telling you it’s painfully loud. When you drive the California freeways, you need every advantage you can get.
The Geneva Conventions mention eye sight but not hearing. That’s why they’re trying to make us deaf but not blind us.
But I’m sure non lethal torture weapons will never be abused, what with the lower barrier to using them and the stellar history of the us military and law enforcement.
Lasers with this power level have a lot of uses. Hope these things get to the surplus market fast.
“They’ve perfected a bloody sound weapon!” Biggles
There’s possibly no more ironically appropriate way to drown out people exercising their freedoms of speech and association than with a the 130-decibel roar of a fighter jet.
140 is hearing unsafe with moderate protection. At 130 you start suffering damage.
There’s a wide spectrum of unpleasantness that falls (un)comfortably within the realm of “nonlethal.” Even the “no permanent damage” category contains a panoply of terrors that should never be visited upon the citizenry, however boisterous and unruly.
“He will not be… permanently damaged.”
What happens if they tune it to the brown note?
Then the shit hits the… fan.
I hope our Wisconsin Capitol Police chief doesn’t hear about this device. 2 years ago he used an LRAD - Long Range Acoustic Device, during the arrests of hundreds of people in the Capitol for singing. He didn’t actually hold it, he had other officers do that, but it had his recorded voice telling people they were violating rules and could be arrested. 20 people/day were arrested over 6 weeks, about 350 in total. But the really ironic things is that when he became chief, he claimed he wanted to crack down on protesters because he saw a child crying and attributed it to one of the singers yelling (it was actually a right winger yelling at us). But there are pictures, during the playing of his message on the LRAD, of a little boy crying in fear, it was so loud.
Stuff like this can only be considered when the authorities forget the people in the protests are citizens and taxpayers too.
And I’m not impressed with the “precision” the gun supposedly offers. During the G20 in Toronto, people got enclosed into kettling groups just because they lived near the protest zone and were out getting groceries (I swear the organisers of the summit totally forgot, or didn’t care, that Toronto’s downtown has a lot of people living in it). I can think of lots of urban layouts where innocent bystanders, supposedly safe in their own homes, will be within range of any kind of sound gun.
Remember, not all of the students shot at Kent State were protestors.
In the same way that bandannas and milk are standard equipment for dealing with gas, smart protesters are going to have to start wearing ear protection.
I wear mine to the movie theater already, because they help a great deal with watching the movie without being tinnitus deaf for the rest of the day.
The electronic ones make it easy to have a conversation and stay protected, and you can jack in an external source.
Ah, but now he’s learned the lesson to be learned: don’t protest against our leaders in Madison. So there’s that.
The told us what they wanted was a sound that could kill someone from a distance:
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