Less than Lethal Tools and Effectiveness

So many of you know I am not a huge fan of less than lethal tools outside of law enforcement use. If you read my thread in Mayberry like a year ago about my fight with the meth head, you know my Taser failed, my ASP was marginally effective and the pepperspray, while effective got everywhere.

So felt I should give an update on my Less Lethal experience. Just had an attempt suicide by cop call. Long story short, extremely intoxicated kid (20 something year old) had a few knives in his hand and after some failed negotiations, decided it would be a good idea to walk out with hands full of edged weapons towards officers while repeatedly saying he was ready to die.

I had a 40 mm less than lethal launcher which fires a foam impact round. See image below.


Firing a round like this:


I took the shot and landed a nice impact along the right hip area of the guy, which dropped him in his tracks. He still held onto the knives and had to be tased twice by another officer and I. We then had to stomp his hands and pry them out of his grasp. All told took about 6 of us to get him into cuffs and treated by the fire department.

I was very impressed with the 40mm's immediate and profound effect on him.

Was also very happy that we took him down with the tools we had and he didn't end up another mental health statistic of suicide by cop. We discussed it after and were pretty confident that he would have died in a hail of gunfire at most other agencies.

 

Excellent work officer.

 

Nice work.

I'm surprised there hasn't been more advances in legitimate less lethal options.

Powerful net guns, taser projectiles low dose tranquilizers, etc.



Do you guys test new stuff from time to time.

 

So it worked as good as it did for Steve McQueen when the Thumped that big Ol Goon?

 

We do. Our SWAT and armorer (a USMC armorer) tested the Taser XREP a while back. Apparently it is not very reliable and did not do as advertised, which is why it is not advertised heavily by Taser International anymore.

We do have some more of the trick type rounds for the multi launcher such as CS, Pepper Spray and marking rounds.

But yeah, overall not a lot of advances in Less Lethal tech that works. Kind of a surprise but then again you assume a shit load of liability if your new wazoo device kills some asshole.