In 1976, the US government officially classified
a small handheld plastic device as, well, a literal
firearm. Right, a firearm, which is pretty wild
when you think about it. Yeah. I mean, if you
wanted to carry it, you had to jump through the
exact same legal hoops as if you were buying
a traditional handgun. And why? Because this
entirely new invention, this very first model
of the Taser, actually used gunpowder to shoot
its electrified darts. It literally used an explosive
propellant. Exactly. Welcome to the deep dive.
If you're joining us today, you're the kind of
person who wants to cut through the noise, skip
the surface level chatter, and, you know, just
get straight to the fascinating core of a complex
topic. You are the learner. And this topic is
a perfect example of how complex things get when
you have this collision between technology and
human biology. Completely. So our mission today
is to unpack the reality of electroshock weapons.
We're going to explore not just what these devices
are, but the wild sci -fi history of how they
were invented, the sheer variety of futuristic
prototypes out there, and the really intense
global, legal, and medical debate surrounding
their use. Yeah, it's an incredibly layered...
I mean, these devices, they feel ubiquitous now,
right? Oh yeah, totally. You see them everywhere.
Exactly. We see them on the bills of law enforcement
all the time. They show up in pop culture constantly.
Yeah. But the actual science of how they interact
with the human nervous system and the really
fragmented, often totally contradictory legal
patchwork governing them globally, it's far more
chaotic than you might think. So before we can
even get into the controversies or the laws,
we have to establish a crucial, really fundamental
distinction from our source material today. There
are two primary types of electroshock weapons,
and people almost always get this wrong. They
do. They use the terms interchangeably all the
time. Right. But mechanically, they're totally
different animals. The distinction between the
sensory and motor systems is really the key to
everything here. So... The two big categories
we're talking about are stun guns and tasers.
Like you said, people use the words as synonyms,
but they operate on completely different biological
principles. Okay, let's break down the how and
the why. Let's start with the stun gun. Right.
So a stun gun is a direct contact weapon. You
have to physically press it against a person.
Like right up against them. Exactly. And it relies
almost entirely on pain compliance, which means
it targets the sensory nervous system. It delivers
a high voltage shock that is just excruciatingly
painful, basically overloading those sensory
nerves to make the person back away. But it doesn't
actually freeze them up, right? Right. No, it
doesn't necessarily paralyze the muscles instantly
well. unless you hold it against them for a really
extended period. But mainly, it just hurts a
lot. OK. And then you have the Taser, which is
a completely different approach to stopping a
human body. Yeah. A Taser is designed as a long
-range weapon. It fires two barbed darts that
trail thin, insulated wires back to the handset.
So it's not just surface pain. No, not at all.
Instead of just causing surface pain via the
sensory system, a taser is designed to disrupt
voluntary muscular control. It basically bypasses
the sensory nerves and goes straight after the
motor nervous system. Causing them to just drop.
Exactly. It causes what is technically called
neuromuscular incapacitation. Now, to be fair,
some modern tasers do blur this line a little
bit. Oh, so. Well, they have this thing called
a drive -stun mode. It allows an operator to
press the device directly against a target without
firing the darts. So essentially using it like
a traditional stun gun. But the primary intended
function is remote motor override. OK, I've been
thinking about a way to visualize this for you,
the listener. A stun gun is like a blaring, incredibly
loud car alarm going off right next to your ear.
I like that. Right. It's sensory. It's painful.
And your immediate instinct is just to get away
from it as fast as possible. But a taser is like
someone else remotely hacking into your car's
computer system and forcibly grabbing the steering
wheel. That is a great analogy. It overrides.
your motor control completely. You aren't driving
the car anymore. That analogy perfectly captures
the biological mechanism. I mean, the taser's
electrical pulses essentially mimic the electrical
signals your brain uses to communicate with your
muscles, but at a volume that completely drowns
out your brain's commands. So your muscles just
fire on their own. Right. They contract involuntarily
and you drop. It's wild. And how we actually
got to that hacking technology is a totally wild
timeline. We have to go back to 1935. Way earlier
than most people think. Yeah. A man named Cyril
Diaz in Cuba invents what is essentially a police
electroshock glove. Which Pete's a rather vivid
Almost comic book picture of law enforcement,
honestly. It's a literal shock glove. And it
delivered 1 ,500 volts of electricity. Now, when
you first hear 1 ,500 volts, it sounds massive.
It does sound like a lot. But if you look at
the specs of modern devices, 1 ,500 volts is
barely a drop in the bucket. It is only about
3 % of the voltage output of a modern taser.
Yeah, that 1935 glove was really just a very
early proof of concept. Yeah. The real leap in
the underlying physics and delivery happened
later. in 1969. Right, with Jack Cover. Exactly.
Jack Cover, who is actually a researcher for
NASA, he began developing the device that would
eventually become the TASER. And I love the origin
of the name, too. TASER isn't just some slick,
focus -grouped tech word from a marketing department.
No, it's actually an acronym. Right. It stands
for Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle, named after
a sci -fi adventure hero from Jack Cover's childhood
reading. It is a really great piece of trivia.
But, you know, Cover's early prototypes had a
pretty significant functional hurdle. The gunpowder.
Yes. As you mentioned at the very start of our
deep dive, the very first Taser model, which
was known as the Public Defender, it used gunpowder
as the propellant to launch the darts out of
the cartridge. Which naturally prompted the Bureau
of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to step in because
of course they did. Right. In 1976, they classified
this brand new electrical device as a firearm.
I mean, if it uses an explosive to fire a projectile,
the law treats it like a gun. And that basically
killed its momentum, right? Pretty much. That
classification severely limited its commercial
viability and civilian adoption, so the technology
had to pivot. By 1983, a company called Nova
Technologies adapted the underlying patents to
create the XR5000. And they just got rid of the
darts entirely. Exactly. They ditched the projectiles,
creating a handheld direct contact device. And
that specific design became the blueprint for
virtually all the comeback stun guns you see
on the market today. OK, let's transition from
the historical evolution to the actual physical
reality of these things. What is the electrical
recipe happening the exact moment that trigger
is pulled? Well, the foundational science relies
on a very specific ratio. It's a high voltage,
low current electrical discharge. Let's unpack
that because voltage and current can be super
confusing for people. The classic analogy is
plumbing, right? Yep. Plumbing works perfectly.
So voltage is the water pressure in the pipes
and current, which is measured in amps, is the
actual volume of water flowing through. That
is absolutely the best way to think about it.
You need extremely high voltage, high pressure
to push the electricity through the resistance
of human skin and layers of clothing. And we're
talking a lot of pressure. A lot. The output
can range anywhere from 100 volts on the low
end up to a massive 6 ,000 volts, delivering
roughly 0 .9 to 10 joules of energy. But the
current, the actual volume of electricity, is
kept relatively low to avoid causing lethal organ
damage. But even the current isn't as simple
as it sounds in the source material. Take the
M26 taser model. It produces a peak current of
18 amps. Which is high. Right. In traditional
electrical systems, 18 amps is more than enough
to be lethal. But the mechanism that makes it
supposedly survivable is a delivery window. It
delivers those 18 amps in tiny micropulses that
only last for about 10 microseconds. Right. The
problem, however, is that the human body does
not behave like a predictable closed electrical
circuit. We aren't just wires. Exactly. The actual
amount of current that successfully hits a target's
nervous system is not a fixed number. It fluctuates
wildly based on a massive list of variables.
We're talking about the target's natural electrical
resistance, the thickness of their skin. The
ambient humidity. Yeah, and their bodily salinity,
meaning how much salty, highly conductive sweat
is on their skin at that exact moment. And of
course, the type and thickness of the clothing
they're wearing, all of that alters the flow.
It really does. It also matters where the probes
actually embed themselves. For maximum neuromuscular
incapacitation, the target areas are typically
the upper shoulder, below the rib cage, and the
upper hip. Basically, you want to widespread
across major muscle groups. Precisely. You want
to cast a wide electrical net. I need to push
back on something here though. We are talking
about low current and micro pulses designed specifically
to prevent death. Yet the manufacturers explicitly
warn that prolonged exposure to these devices
can lead to cumulative exhaustion and breathing
impairment. That doesn't sound like a clean harmless
override to me. That tension is exactly where
the engineering hits the messy reality of human
biology. I mean, a healthy, resting 30 -year
-old might handle a standard pulse with no lasting
physical damage. Sure, in a lab setting. Right.
But what happens if the target has an underlying,
undiagnosed heart condition? What if they are
in a state of extreme agitation, or their system
is flooded with adrenaline or narcotics? The
baseline changes completely. It does. A quote
-unquote safe, low current suddenly becomes a
massive physiological burden. And the mechanism
of delivery plays a huge role in that burden.
The X26 model, for instance, has a built -in
safety measure. When you pull the trigger, it
automatically starts after a five -second burst,
five seconds of incapacitation. But the critical
flaw, or feature, depending on how you view it,
is that the software does not prevent the operator
from simply pulling the trigger a second time.
Oh, wow. Or a third time. In fact, an operator
can hold the trigger down continuously. As long
as the device has battery life and some models
can sustain a charge for up to 10 minutes, that
electricity can keep flowing into the target.
Ten uninterrupted minutes of high voltage motor
override. That is a terrifying amount of time
for a human heart to endure. It really is. And
that realization that human error or extended
triggers can escalate the danger is probably
why we've seen this exact same electrical science
aggressively adapted into other formats, right?
Trying to manage distance and control. And some
of these formats are genuinely bizarre. Oh, absolutely
bizarre. You have the standard compact devices.
often disguised as lipsticks or cell phones for
the civilian self -defense market. But in law
enforcement and corrections, the scale changes
entirely. What do they use? Well, you see baton
-style prods, which are longer and offer more
leverage. You see stun shields, which have exposed
electrodes embedded right into the convex face
of a riot shield designed for crowd control.
And then you have the remote -controlled applications
like the stun belts. The source material mentions
the REACT belt, which is heavily used on prisoners
in the United States. Yes, the REACT belt. It
fastens around the waist, the leg, or the arm.
It can be used to physically restrain the hands.
But the primary function is the shock mechanism.
It is triggered by a remote control held by an
officer. Or it can be programmed to trigger automatically
if the prisoner makes a sudden unauthorized movement.
It is basically the ultimate form of compliance
through the threat of immediate invisible distance
enforcement. Yeah. And increasing that distance
is the primary goal of the newer. more experimental
prototypes. Take the XREP, for example. Right.
Which stands for Extended Range Electromuscular
Projectile. Exactly. That is essentially a wireless
electroshock projectile that gets fired out of
a standard 12 gauge shotgun. Instead of trailing
wires back to a handgun. Right. Instead of trailing
wires, the shotgun shell itself contains a tiny
high voltage battery. It hits the target, embeds
the electrodes and delivers the shock wirelessly,
boasting a 30 meter range. But even the XREP
looks conventional. compared to some of the prototypes
out there. There have been serious engineering
attempts to create weapons that administer an
electric shock through a continuous stream of
fluid. Yeah that one is it's out there. An electrified
super soaker. Essentially yes. The idea is to
shoot a stream of highly conductive liquid like
a metallic solution or just heavy salt water.
The logic being that you wouldn't need to reload
individual dart cartridges, and you could sweep
the stream across multiple targets. But the practical
flaws with that are almost comical. If an officer
shoots a suspect with a heavy stream of electrified
salt water, that water doesn't just vanish. No,
it has to go somewhere. It pools on the ground.
Suddenly, the suspect is standing in an electrified
puddle, and the officers trying to move in and
apprehend them are stepping into that exact same
puddle. Plus, you would need a massive heavy
tank just to carry the fluid. Those logistical
nightmares are exactly why it remains a prototype.
Yeah. But an even more chaotic concept is the
plasma taser. The aerosol concept. This one truly
baffles me. The design proposes using a pressurized
aerosol spray as the conductive medium for the
electricity instead of a solid wire or a liquid
stream. But think about the physics of gas. If
an officer sprays an electrified aerosol cloud
in an enclosed space, like a narrow hallway or
a small room, doesn't the natural expansion of
the gas mean they just end up shocking themselves
and literally everyone else in the room? That
is the precise fundamental flaw. Gas expands
to fill its container. If you electrify a cloud
of gas, everyone breathing or standing in that
cloud becomes part of the electrical circuit.
It's crazy. It is an indiscriminate area of effect
weapon in a field that supposedly demands absolute
precision. The Russian S -5 cyclical stun pistol
seems a bit more grounded in reality, at least.
Developed by Oleg and Tishkin, it relies on physical
wire, but it fires tensioned, uninsulated wire.
Right, a different mechanical approach. And the
innovation there is that it can cycle multiple
shots with successive pulls of the trigger, whereas
a standard taser usually requires the operator
to manually reload a new cartridge after a single
shot. It really demonstrates the global race
to refine this technology. But every time the
technology evolves, especially when we talk about
remote -controlled stun belts or devices capable
of extended repeated shocks, it brings us face
to face with the darkest, most heavily debated
aspect of these tools. The ethical controversies.
Exactly. The ethics and the medical realities
of fatal encounters. And before we dive into
this part, I need to explicitly state to you,
the listener, that we are remaining strictly
impartial here. We aren't taking a political
stance on policing. We are simply reporting the
medical findings and human rights claims documented
in our source material. It's important context.
Because we have to look at how these tools actually
impact communities and human lives. For a very
long time, the defense and security industries
categorized electroshock weapons strictly as,
quote unquote, non -lethal. But that language
has shifted significantly over the years. Taser
International itself. no longer uses the term
non -lethal. Interesting. Yeah. They now describe
the devices as less lethal, or they frame them
as being safer than other use of force options.
That shift from non to less is a massive medical
and legal concession. Now, there are certainly
clinical studies like those conducted by the
Cleveland Clinic and UC San Diego that demonstrate
healthy subjects experiencing no severe short
-term effects. Right, and showing that standard
pacemakers generally withstand the electrical
pulses fine. But... Controlled clinical trials
on calm, healthy volunteers do not reflect the
reality of the streets. No, they don't. The physical
reality on the ground is where the tragedies
occur. We see highly publicized fatal incidents.
Take the case of Robert Zekanski, a Polish immigrant
at the Vancouver airport. That was a huge story.
It was. He was highly agitated, and during his
restraint, he was subjected to multiple shocks.
He experienced sudden cardiac death, with the
pathologist later noting that chronic alcoholism
was a contributory factor in how his heart handled
the stress. Or the case of Roberto Lodizio Curti
in Sydney. He was a 21 -year -old tourist. The
documented scene was incredibly chaotic. Very
chaotic. He was pepper sprayed, physically compressed
against the ground by the combined weight of
several police officers, and simultaneously shocked
repeatedly with tasers. He did not survive, and
the subsequent coroner's report explicitly called
the repeated overlapping use of those electroshock
devices excessive and unnecessary. To understand
why repeated shocks are so uniquely dangerous,
we have to look at the heart itself. A major
study conducted for the Canadian Broadcasting
Corporation found a terrifying biological mechanism
at play. They investigated something called ventricular
fibrillation. Which is what? Ventricular fibrillation
is a condition where the electrical signals in
the lower chambers of the heart become entirely
scrambled. So instead of pumping blood forcefully,
the heart muscle essentially just quivers. Oh,
God. Yeah. Blood pressure drops to zero and without
immediate intervention, it is fatal. And the
CBC study found that the energy threshold required
to induce that deadly fibrillation drops dramatically
with each successive burst of pulses. That is
the core medical danger. The human heart relies
on a very precise electrical rhythm. When a taser
hits you, it introduces massive external electrical
noise. A huge shock to the system. Right. Your
heart might survive that first five second burst
and recover, but if the trigger is pulled immediately
again for a second, third, or fourth burst, the
heart doesn't have time to fully reset its natural
rhythm. So it's compounding. Exactly. Every subsequent
shock requires far less energy to trigger total
cardiac collapse. So it makes me wonder, does
the label less -legal actually make these weapons
more dangerous in practice? How do you mean?
Well, because if the person pulling the trigger
assumes they won't be permanent, lethal consequences,
unlike drawing a traditional firearm, they might
deploy the electricity much earlier and much
more frequently in situations that don't actually
warrant it. That psychological paradox is precisely
why international human rights organizations
are so deeply concerned. Amnesty International
and the UN Committee Against Torture have evaluated
these devices. And what did they find? They have
officially classified the use of stun belts and
the excessive repeated use of tasers as potential
forms of torture. Because they inflict acute
agonizing pain. The pain is central to it, absolutely,
but it's also the physical aftermath. Think about
it. A traditional police baton leaves obvious
trauma. Deep bruising, lacerations, or broken
bones. Evidence. Right, evidence. An electroshock
weapon can inflict overwhelming neurological
agony but leave almost nothing behind except
a tiny puncture wound or a small red mark. The
lack of visible evidence creates a terrifyingly
high potential for abuse. It is literally an
invisible application of force. And because the
medical consensus is so fractured between safe
in a lab and fatal on the street, the legal status
of electroshock weapons globally is a complete
jigsaw puzzle. Oh, it's a mess. Let's trace how
different governments actually try to regulate
them. In the United States, the legal framework
is heavily dictated by the Second Amendment.
Yes. In 2016, the US Supreme Court heard a pivotal
case, Caetano v. Massachusetts. The core question
there was whether stun guns and tasers are protected
as quote unquote bearable arms under the constitution,
even though they obviously weren't invented when
the second amendment was written. And the court's
rationale essentially confirmed that Second Amendment
protections do extend to modern instruments of
self -defense. That single ruling triggered a
massive domino effect across the country. It
really did. Broad, outright bans on civilian
ownership in states like Hawaii, Massachusetts,
New York, Rhode Island, and New Jersey have all
been struck down or formally repealed in recent
years. Even local city ordinances like those
in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New Orleans were
completely dismantled. So in the U .S., they
are widely available. to the public. But if you
take a flight across the Atlantic to the United
Kingdom, you enter a totally different legal
universe. Night and day. Under the UK's Firearms
Act, electroshock devices are classified outright
as prohibited weapons. Simply possessing one
can result in a prison sentence of up to ten
years. Ten years. Yeah. And if the device is
disguised as an everyday object, like those flashlight
or cell phone stun guns we mentioned, there is
a mandatory minimum sentence of five years. The
UK authorities do not compromise on that classification,
even for their own law enforcement. There is
actually a wild incident from 2010 that proves
just how strict they are. Northumbria police
were engaged in a massive, high profile manhunt.
Right, I remember reading about this in the source
material. During the standoff, officers deployed
the XREP wireless shotgun caser we discussed
earlier, but it was later revealed that the XREP
had never actually been officially approved for
use by the UK government. Yeah, the civilian
supplier had simply brought the prototype to
the scene and handed it over to the desperate
officers. When the Home Secretary found out,
they completely revoked the supplier's license
to provide taser systems. It really underscores
a rigid adherence to protocol. Meanwhile, a country
like Canada presents a completely different regulatory
hurdle, bureaucratic paralysis. For years, the
Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the RCMP, operated
under a massive legal misunderstanding. A paperwork
issue, essentially. Exactly. They erroneously
classified tasers in their internal paperwork
as prohibited weapons rather than prohibited
firearms. Now, to a layperson, that sounds like
pure semantics. A weapon versus a firearm. Who
cares? But in a legal framework... The distinction
dictates exactly who has the legal authority
to authorize, carry, and deploy the device under
provincial policing acts. Because of that simple
paperwork error, the actual legal authority of
Canadian police to use these devices was thrown
into serious question for years. It caused widespread
operational confusion. And if you look at the
rest of the world, the rules just vary wildly
from border to border. In the Czech Republic,
these devices are classified as class CI firearms,
which means what exactly? That means they are
freely available to purchase over the counter
for anyone over the age of 18 who has a clean
criminal record in a registered address. Oh,
wow. And in Brazil, they are heavily integrated
into the daily patrols of municipal guards. But
in Japan, they are strictly prohibited, banned
for civilian import, purchase or carrying in
any capacity. Think about the sheer absurdity
of that global landscape for a second. You could
be a tourist who legally buys a stun gun in a
shop in Prague. You drop it into your checked
luggage. If your connecting flight gets diverted
and you land in London, you are suddenly facing
a decade in a British prison for possessing the
exact same piece of plastic and wire that you
bought legally that morning. It perfectly illustrates
how human technological innovation consistently
outpaces international consensus. I mean, we
have engineered a tool that interacts with the
deepest biological functions of the human nervous
system, yet every legal border you cross applies
a fundamentally different interpretation of what
that tool actually represents. We've covered
a massive amount of ground today. We've traced
the evolution from a crude 1500 volt Cuban police
glove in the 1930s to Thomas Swift's electric
rifle. We've explored the bizarre engineering
dead ends of fluid streams and electrified aerosols.
We've broken down the biological mechanisms to
the critical difference between targeting the
sensory nerves with a stun gun versus forcefully
overriding the motor system with a taser. And
we've looked at the very real, often tragic medical
realities of deploying electricity into the unpredictable
human body. We've seen how a device designed
to save lives can become fatal, and how the global
legal system is still struggling to decide if
these tools are valid instruments of self -defense,
prohibited firearms, or invisible instruments
of abuse. Which leaves us with a lingering question
about where this technology goes next. If engineering
continues to advance, try to imagine a future
where an electroshock weapon is perfected. Perfected
how? Imagine it truly has zero risk of pain,
zero risk of cardiac stress, and zero risk of
death. It is just a perfectly safe, immediate,
and temporary pause button for the human body.
A completely harmless biological pause button.
Yes. Would achieving that perfection finally
end the ethical controversy? Or, and this is
the really scary thought, if authorities had
access to a totally harmless pause button, would
they begin to use it so casually for every minor
argument or infraction that it fundamentally
destroys the very concept of physical freedom?
Wow. If it doesn't hurt, does it become too easy
to use? That is the thought that is going to
stay with me for a long time. Thank you for joining
us on this deep dive. Keep asking questions and
keep challenging your assumptions. Because as
we've discovered today, when it comes to applying
technology to the human body, that expectation
of precision, that clean, predictable push of
a button is just an illusion. The reality is
always infinitely more complex.