Stun Gun Society

A recent story about a fight between two civilians with tazers seemed to mirror my own private predictions about what would happen if society ever got a real stun gun.

The ‘tazer’ isn’t it.  It’s the electrical equivalent of a baton round; it hurts like blazes and you fall down.  If you have a heart condition or the person responsible is enjoying himself too much, maybe you don’t get up again.  A real stun gun — real as in fictional, since that was where the things were originally described — wouldn’t hurt: you’d just collapse in a heap and get up again fifteen minutes later.

Imagine a world where these things are freely available.  It seems to me that this would both justify and undermine the current US attitude to guns: sure, everyone has a right to defend themselves!  Only now you can do it without hurting anyone!  The NRA would be furious.  Would anyone need old-fasioned, killer ordenance again?

It sounds like a boon to society; the end of violence.  But I’m not so sure.  I think we’d see dueling become popular again.  I think we’d see people shooting each other for the most trivial of reasons.  People would shoot each other as a joke.  And of course, it’s still possible to kill someone with a stungun — you can shoot them while they are driving, for example.

I think the news story above shows two people who didn’t have to think twice about how to resolve their differences, because they could shoot each other without permanent harm.  No matter how unlikely my stungun society is, that particular scenario is something that we are going to have to get used to.

Oh, thanks to the ubiquitous New Shelton Wet/Dry for the link to the above article.  And I can’t help but think that some 50’s SF author covered the whole subject before I was even born.  Phillip K Dick, maybe?

~ by shadowfirebird on May 20, 2008.