WASHINGTON - August 2, 2011 - If you’re in a position to be tasered, you’ve typically got one not very impressive advantage: the police officer or rent-a-cop trying to send 20,000 volts through your body has to be pretty close to you. But your advantage is about to disappear in a hail of electric shock cartridges.
Taser International is teaming up with Australian electric gun company Metal Storm to produce a bowel-liquifying stun shotgun called - seriously - MAUL. Picture if you will, a 12-gauge shotgun that stacks stun cartridges, one on top of one another, and uses electricity to fire them out, railgun-style. Five of Taser’s XREP cartridges come flying at you from 30 yards away - “semi-automatic fire as fast as the operator can squeeze the trigger,” the company boasted on Thursday.
Yes, an electric, semi-automatic Taser shotgun. Full reload of all five cartridges takes all of two seconds. Not even a steroided-out Ben Johnson can run 30 yards that quickly.
MAUL is “ideally suited” for “law enforcement and military applications,” Taser explains - a kind of remote crowd control of pain. Or, as Taser founder Tom Smith put it, “We developed the XREP to provide an extended range for situations where a close approach was dangerous or not possible.”
This isn’t the first collaboration between Taser and Metal Storm. The ostensible “million-rounds-a-minute” gun manufacturer worked with Taser to create a ground robot that zapped you, way back in 2007.
Yet Metal Storm has endured a rocky few years, getting dumped by financial indices and losing a fair amount of public confidence. It’s been buoyed by lucrative and super secret military contracts. Still, Taser has confidence that Metal Storm can get MAUL to market, as it’s a stun-gun variant of one of the company’s existing shotguns.
But don’t call the XREP’s charge an electric shock, even though it is. Call it a “neuro muscular incapacitation bio-effect,” says Taser.
Whatever you want to call it, think twice before you interrupt a baseball game by running out onto the field. The cops may not have to tackle you to fill you with a stun charge; and your drunk self doesn’t run so well, anyway.
