There’s a story I want to write sometime, and there’s so many possible variants of it that I don’t mind sharing the idea, because it’s cool and because it allows me to go on a rant about the absurdity of “nonlethal force.”
It’s a common lament by those who know nothing about physics, biology, and combat (usually all three) after a fatal shooting that “they should have tried harder not to kill him.” The fact that sometimes this is true only complicates the matter. Usually there’s some degree of wondering why so-called nonlethal measures were not available or deployed.
Of the nonlethal force commonly depicted in movies and bloviated about by know-nothings, all have their difficulties. Gas can be dispersed by wind, rain, is hard to direct, possible to resist, can be neutralized fairly easily and can be fatal against the wrong targets. Tasers can be defeated by thick clothing or strike an area that fails to incapacitate. Drug darts take a long time to work. Allegedly sublethal force such as rubber bullets, blows to the head and blunt weapons can quickly become lethal in the wrong circumstances.
However, the whole argument can be seen for the moot pile of rubbish it is simply by doing a little thought experiment: consider the Star Trek phaser. It’s really the perfect nonlethal weapon: it works instantly, isn’t blocked by armor thinner than a wall, and renders the victim asleep for minutes to hours with no harmful aftereffects.
What’s never seen in Star Trek is the answer to the simple question, what happens if you bounce a six-foot man’s head off a concrete floor with no way for his reflexes to save him. That can crack a skull and kill you. And that assumes the man is standing still. What if he is running at about 10 mph? Riding a bicycle? Driving a car? Standing on a ledge? In a tree? In such circumstances, all of which would be quite common in chasing down a criminal, even a Star Trek phaser would quickly become, regardless of the will of the user, a lethal weapon.
None of this even touches, of course, on how much harm such a weapon could do in the hands of a bad actor. Imagine a world in which kidnappers can insure their victims do not struggle or scream. Murderers would have ample time to take their victims to sites comparatively easy to conceal or destroy. And the thought of it in the hands of a rapist is too awful to contemplate. there are any numbers of stories that could be written about the perversion of the nonlethal, and the more I think most of them would quickly descend into the horror genre.
G. Scott Huggins 