How Governments Are Getting Around the UN's Ban On Blinding Laser Weapons 180
Lasrick writes Despite the UN's 1995 Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons, the world is moving closer to laser weapons in both military and law enforcement situations that can cause temporary and even permanent blindness. Military-funded research in this area continues to be conducted by the Optical Radiation Bioeffects and Safety program, and already "dazzlers" have been in use in Afghanistan. Domestic versions of these weapons are intended for use by law enforcement agencies and in theory cause motion-sickness type illness but not blindness. "But something bright enough to dazzle at 300 meters can cause permanent eye damage at 50 meters, and these devices can be set to deliver a narrow (and more intense) beam."
Not much different than the fire starting lasers (Score:5, Insightful)
Used on Navy boats. They manual says "for starting fires", but, of course, anyone that looks towards the fire at the reflected beam is most likely blinded, and anyone can walk in front of it. This is no different. The manual says for dazzling at long distance. "Improper use" or "unintended circumstances" will be the excuse when people start to go blind with any of these weapons.
Last time I mentioned tens of kw fire starting lasers potentially leading to blindness from primary or even greater reflections...people down voted me here.
Re:Not much different than the fire starting laser (Score:4, Informative)
It's wavelength dependent. visible light will blind people but for the military combat lasers they probably use wavelengths that the eye is opaque to, meaning no focusing on the retina and damage due to minor scatter and reflections, but will still literally cook the eye if directly exposed.
Also, the military type blinder weapons that was developed in the past to intentionally blind had a kilometer+ range. Blindness at 50 meter or blindness at 2km? Is it really a getting around or unintenional consequences(in the same manner that less-lethal weapons can still be lethal)
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Most invisible lasers are infra-red.
Infra-red will certainly go through the eye's lens and cook the eye.
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Yes plenty of laser glasses out there.
When people's eyeballs are at stake you kinda don't want dirt cheap eBay glasses though.
Re:Not much different than the fire starting laser (Score:4, Funny)
It's like the sign says, "Do not shine laser in remaining eye."
Re:Not much different than the fire starting laser (Score:5, Interesting)
"Article 3 Blinding as an incidental or collateral effect of the legitimate military employment of laser systems, including laser systems used against optical equipment, is not covered by the prohibition of this Protocol."
As long as the blinding is a side effect (mitigated by "all feasible precautions to avoid the incidence of permanent blindness to unenhanced vision") of a non-blinding purpose(setting things on fire, destroying machine vision/optical sensor gear, 'dazzling', and basically anything else you might feel like using a laser for, it's all legal. That is not exactly fertile ground for any sort of serious arms control, even if lasers weren't comparatively cheap and trivial to build, especially at the modest powers that will really boil your eyeballs but aren't subject to the engineering challenges of aspirational air-defense and antimissile systems.
It gives me no pleasure to say so; blinding is a pretty ugly thing to do; but the Protocol as written is about as effective as forbidding murder; but making it legal to put a bullet through any hat you see, regardless of whether it contains a head or not.
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How is blinding someone with a laser worse than killing or maiming them with a bullet?
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How is blinding someone with a laser worse than killing or maiming them with a bullet?
Welcome to international rules of war. They're chock full of semi-absurdities like this. One of my favorite is the fact that the M2 .50 caliber machine gun is not classified as an anti-personnel weapon. That means you are not allowed to shoot people with it. You can, however, shoot it at any sort of military equipment, including any that may be carried or worn by an enemy soldier.
I say "semi-absurdities" because with all of these rules you can construct situations where they do make a difference and make
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Does a uniform count as military equipment?
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Does a uniform count as military equipment?
From what I was told, no. But a web belt does, and so does a rifle.
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I have never, ever, seen good evidence for the claim that the .50-caliber machine gun may not be used as an anti-personnel weapon. I haven't found anything about it in any treaty I've read, or ever seen a reference to some sort of regulation.
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The laws of war generally oppose weapons intentionally intended to maim rather than kill. Mostly dates to popular revulsion around the WW1 era over weapons designed to inflict nonlethal but gruesome casualties to hobble the other side by flooding their hospitals and supply chains. As a result, countries agreed to a ban on various chemical weapons, expanding bullets, weapons designed to blind people, etc.
Absolutely false (Score:4, Informative)
One of the primary reasons that the US Military went with a 5.56mm round instead of the standard 7.62mm is because it does not kill, it wounds people more often. Military Philosophy is that if you wound an enemy, it takes 3 soldiers out of commission and demoralizes them. The wounded soldier, a medic, and someone to carry the guy to the medic. Killing someone only takes 1 person out of commission, and will often make enrage their companions.
The convention against certain types of weapons had nothing to do with not wounding someone, it had to do with humane ways of wounding and killing people. This is why it's perfectly fine to stab someone with a smooth bayonet but you can not stab someone with a serrated bayonet, even though death from serrated bayonet was more likely. You can stitch up a wound from one pretty easily, the other is going to leave a big mess that probably won't be closable..
wounding != maiming (Score:2)
Worst is something that will almost certainly kill you, but does it slowly. More humane, but hardly different in the end, is something that kills you quickly. Best is something that takes you out of commission for a while, but causes no permanent damage. Fairly rotten is something that has a tendency to cause permanent disability, but less likely to kill. This last one causes a lot of damage to militaries and governments, even if individuals would prefer to be permanently disabled then killed. Although bull
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Best is something that takes you out of commission for a while, but causes no permanent damage
From a law enforcement perspective I absolutely agree with you. From a military perspective, this is not true. You don't want to blind someone for 24 hours and have them back on the battlefield (as one example of obviously many).
I'm happy to share knowledge and ideas with you, but we should set terms and ensure that we are discussing the same subject. I posted this due to someone presenting a false military doctrine. If we attempt to merge military and law enforcement doctrines we end up with conflictin
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unless you want to capture someone alive, intact, with no visable damage. The military faces many scenarios where it wants to use force and kill someone, such as driving civilians out of a battlefield, and capturing enemy forces.
Yes, they occationally like to capture people.
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From a law enforcement perspective I absolutely agree with you. From a military perspective, this is not true. You don't want to blind someone for 24 hours and have them back on the battlefield (as one example of obviously many).
Could you give an example of a weapon that disables someone for 24 hours? Most weapons would disable for minutes or hours (flashbang, tear gas, taser, tranquilizers), or for weeks or months (eg bullets).
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Many of the current non-lethal weapons have long lasting side effects. Such as severe pain lasting up to a days after the person is exposed (Lasers/Taser), vomiting and nausea (LRAD), loss of equilibrium (Lasers/LRAD), and if you read warnings you will find more. Side effect durations often vary, so giving 24 hours was not intended as a literal (we know bob can't fight for 23 hours and 59 seconds after he left the field).
Tear gas as a non-lethal weapon is actually not that bad assuming exposure is short
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what happened with the M16 is one giant fiasco after another, and we got left with the 65 grain round which does nothing well. There is no good reason for it, and it sucks, and no one likes it, and it has terrible stopping power.
> This is why it's perfectly fine to stab someone with a smooth
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Before then, no military issued serrated bayonets for their lethality, only the mistaken impression they could be used as cutting tools, which they could not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayonet
>One of these multipurpose designs was the 'sawback' bayonet, which incorporated saw teeth on the spine of the blade.[6] The sawback bayonet was intended for us
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This doesn't mean the convention has nothing to do with it, but it's not surprising that the Geneva convention would choose to adopt the rules that everyone was already following a lot of the time.
Also note that your history indicated that "sawback" bayonets were mainly used by the German armies. Adopting a prohibition against them may have been a political move to allow retroactive condemnation of the "uncivilized" enemy army.
Causation in the real world is usually a complicated thing. Especially when pol
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long before the geneva convention, and they dropped it on their own, without a convention, because they made shitty multitools.
remember, chemical warfare was against the earlier hauge convention, which existed long before WW1, which banned all the chemicals used in such.
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Why do you think that would prevent them from being criticized as uncivilized after they had already lost? I'll agree that it's a silly reason, but political decisions are often based around something equally silly...
Were they criticized for it? Not that I know of. This doesn't mean it wasn't a part of the reason. (OTOH, there's no evidence that I know of that *does* indicate it was part of the reason.)
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http://olive-drab.com/od_edged_weapons_bayonet_m9.php
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Right, because the military is the worst possible place to learn about the military. I'm better asking Richard Jewel about 2 man tactics than I am reading a military TM, which provides the history and theory as well as the tactics.
Just like your stupid ass bayonet claim, it's fucking wrong. The US Military does not have any serrations on their weapons because of Geneva conventions. It can not be used as a multipurpose tool, and has not been issued as a multipurpose tool for that exact reason. If you nee
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no. I am just saying, repeating what they teach you in BCT as absolute fact is bullshit. Lot of it is outdated(generally fighting a few wars past), and very biased.
>Just like your stupid ass bayonet claim, it's fucking wrong.
I serious suggest reading something before getting mad.
>ad hominem
you keep using that word, you don't seem to know what it means. It doesn't mean "someone proved me wrong on internets", like I
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How is blinding someone with a laser worse than killing or maiming them with a bullet?
The assorted 'laws of war' are heavily leavened by what their framers suspect that they can actually get at least some people to agree to; but the overall theoretical foundation always seems to be an attempt to steer weapons in the direction of "Kills outright, or leaves a wound that, if treated, will heal with comparatively limited permanent damage."
It's not an easy standard to maintain(both in terms of convenience, mass-maiming is a hell of a shock to morale and logistics, and engineering, something th
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In addition to this a lot of the rules are centred around clean up operations later. It's one of the reasons for the discussions around cluster munitions. In 2010 about 100 countries agreed to stop the use, manufacture and delivery of cluster munitions - about 35 have ratified that I think.
It has nothing to do with them being inhumane and everything to do with cleaning up the un-exploded bomblets later.
The other is the ban on anti-personnel land mines. It is the cleanup costs later.
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This world holds a lot of horrors worse than death for our tribe of domesticated monkeys. Personally, I would rather die than go blind... But of course, given that we as a society regularly allow the infirm to live past birth, holding such a belief has become gauche to an extreme. Handbasket, please.
That said, this has nothing to do with issues of morality and mercy, and everything to do with military logistics. A
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People get killed in wars, that's been pretty much understood and accepted by the populace. However, there is that little phrase "worse than death". Exactly what it means may vary by culture and time pe
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It is down to a matter of control. One bullet fired at a particular target versus a continuous beam of laser energy including, potential for reflection, aim vagaries and the threat to civilians, much like using chemical or biological weapons. The preference is to get the enemy army to surrender not to mass main or murder as many soldiers and civilian bystanders as quickly as possible. If that was the case we might as well just let the nukes fly and get it over with. So it is worse because of likely hood of
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An intentional blinder could be built to sweep square miles of terrain from a drone. The protocol at least prevent that sort of weapon, though it's a bit retarded that trying or succeeding in killing someone is totally okay but anything less is not.
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Does anyone give two shits what the UN says, I mean really?
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Does anyone give two shits what the UN says, I mean really?
You misunderstand the way the UN works. It is a collection of the world's states. The UN blinding-laser protocol is a protocol authored by various states, and signed by various states. In this case the protocol on blinding weapons was co-authored by the US, and was signed by the US in 2009.
Does anyone care what the "UN says"? In this case, yes, in 2009 the US consented to be bound by that protocol, so it becomes part of the body of US federal law, so yes everyone in the US cares about it.
Hint: whenever you
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Be that as it may, laws that are not enforced or do not have penalties for infraction that are enforced are meaningless.
Not true. Often laws are in place to provide cover for those who want to engage in activities the laws sound like they should prevent. For instance if you have a law that has a few well crafted loopholes then the people engaging in activities that may not fall under a technical definition of the law but are certainly against its spirit can point at the law and say "hey, we are following all relevant laws so we are the good guys".
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Piss off. The UN's own members ignore it regularly. The organization is a joke.
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nope.jpg
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Well, in theory anybody can choose to violate the laws of war, but if you do so chances are your enemies will do so as well.
So, you could go bombing enemy hospitals. The problem with doing that is that it doesn't really get you much (you're bombing people that are already out of action), and then you suddenly have to put all your own hospitals in bunkers lest they be bombed.
Likewise, if you start firing off gas weapons, then you get to watch cities full of thousands of people being killed with gas in retal
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Does anyone give two shits what the UN says, I mean really?
The soldiers care.
The US is a signatory, and the US military has given long prison sentences to its own soldiers who have violated the Army's Rules of Engagement which are an extension of the Geneva Conventions.
BTW, 1995 Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons is part of the Geneva Convention on the conduct of warfare. It's not simply a UN resolution.
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Then enjoy living is your shithole nation...
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Rules don't apply to America (Score:2, Insightful)
They only expect these rules enforced on other nations.
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Re:Rules don't apply to America (Score:5, Insightful)
That is, unless its a rule that our leaders want to be bound by. Ask them about ending marijuana prohibition and, if you manage to get past everything else, they will happily fall back on "but the treaties we have at the UN wont let us do that, so see, we can't".
Its nice to be able to be selective in what rules apply to you and what ones don't, its almost like not having rules at all, except better, because you still get to use them as an excuse when you don't want to do something.
Pink Floyd (Score:1)
Bhal initiate casts: (Score:1)
Powerword Blindess, roll fort save vs 14 or be permanently blinded!
nothing new - you can make one yourself (Score:1)
Go to adafruit and you can make one as well
https://learn.adafruit.com/bedazzler/overview
Preferable to shooting? (Score:1)
The simple fact is that in a world where non-uniformed combatants is becoming the norm then "less than lethal" means will become more wide spread.
Getting a dazzler waved at you isn't fun. But then it is generally healthier than weapons fire in the form of a 'warning shot'.
Dazzlers are a way of reaching out to the edge of aimed rifle fire (300-400 meters) and warning somebody that they are in a kill zone that they may not want to be in.
Re:Preferable to shooting? (Score:5, Insightful)
Right. But being non-lethal, there is less to discourage cops from using this technology against the "$15 per hour now" marches instead of potentially violent confrontations.
Police are there to protect the public order, not your civil rights. And public order is often defined by the upper classes as not wanting to see a bunch of dirty hippies marching with signs.
One of those strange rules of war. (Score:5, Interesting)
I can shoot you in the head and kill you but I can not just intentionally blind you?
Actually it seems like a simple enough technical problem. When you go to fire the first burst is a range finder burst and then you set the power for the range. Of course this would all be done by the weapon and not the user.
Re:One of those strange rules of war. (Score:4, Insightful)
We want dead bodies and stories about the war and trauma and your buddies dying at the hands of krauts and sand-niggers, not living proof of the pain and suffering of war.
War is a far-away thing: your daddy went off and didn't come back, or he came back with mental problems because he is a pussy. We don't want war sitting in our houses, in our day-to-day lives. We might stop worshiping veterans and start questioning if all the wars we're in are necessary or if we should only take to arms under more scrutiny.
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"We might stop worshiping veterans and start questioning if all the wars we're in are necessary "
1. It is respecting veterans. They do not decide which wars are just and which are not the voters and elected officials do.
Maybe but isn't a great thing that we have a peace loving president in the Whitehouse.....
Re:One of those strange rules of war. (Score:4, Insightful)
> 1. It is respecting veterans. They do not decide which wars are just and which are not the voters and elected
> officials do.
Yes they do. They decided to join, they decided to follow orders. Sorry, I don't believe anyone has the right to ceede is own moral reasoning to others. They are equally guilty as the people who gave the orders, the elected officials and "voters" (for as much as their opinion matters when their opinion is just picking between the offerings put before them by the colluding parties)
They decided when they joined, they decided when they got up in the morning and didn't refuse to go fight. No exceptions.
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If you feel that way then when your country is involved in a war which you don't approve of it is your moral duty to quit paying taxes (and take the consequences). You said, "no exceptions" and in moral involvement there isn't that much difference between funding a war and fighting in it directly.
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That brings up a good point. That is probably why the government automatically deducts taxes from the paychecks of most employees.
Then maybe your duty even extends to things like civil disobedience to try and obstruct you government from behaving in this way? I am not sure I actually agree with this, but I do understand people who do.
There is an interesting side point to this though with regard to Israel in that US taxpayers do help foot the bill to pay for their armed forces. They also pay a sizable amount to Egypt to keep the military there Israel friendly and maintain the blockade of Gaza.
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrar... [jewishvirtuallibrary.org]
http://www [bbc.co.uk]
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You are right, and its really why I hate them so much, because the blood on my own hands for doing nothing is enough to drown me. Sometimes at night when I put my arms around my wife in warmth and safety, it drives me to actual tears to know what I have materially helped deny others.
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Yet you are not in jail for refusing to pay your taxes or protesting.....
So you parade you self loathing for all to see to try feel morally superior yet will not risk anything much less your physical life to stop it.
Please keep your emotional self loathing, self righteousness, and your facade of moral superiority to yourself or put yourself on the line and do something about it.
Frankly I have studied enough history that I believe that the way to security and frankly the least suffering it to fight the small
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And I see that as an entirely false dichotomy. That said, I really could not possibly care less about the foreign wars. Yes I would like to see them end and I would like to stop engaging in other people's problems. I don't see why we prop up countries like Isreal or why Europe can't pony up for its own defense if it really needs so much.
However, its the domestic wars that deny people freedom over their own personal choices while claiming to provide liberty that piss me off more. Arresting people for victim
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Ahh the pro drug supporter.... Simple work to change the law it has happened in a few states so far. The self loathing pity and show of emotion is now even more into the range of ridiculous.
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Your opinion is your own, and I understand it but, simple leagalzation means forgiveness, and I have none of that for these crimes. None is deserved.
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On the principle that, if I'm opposed to one war (let's say the 2003 invasion of Iraq), I lose all legitimacy if I don't oppose all military action (like, say, the invasion of Afghanistan, bombing ISIL, that sort of thing)? Since you appear to approve the bombing of Libya, I take it that you approve of all wars, or are you a hypocrite?
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Fuck oaths. No oath you take excuses you from moral reasoning. I don't care what promises they made, no promise removes your moral responsibility and allows you to assign it to someone else. A promise to do evil deserves to be broken.
In fact, I can honestly say, I have no respect for oaths. If the actions a person would ask you to take were actually good and just, no oath would be needed to hold against you. There is no greater scumbag than someone who asks others for oaths.
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They all talk about "serving their country". They join "to serve", or they join because they think they're hot shit and want to get some combat experience so they can feel tough. The second group should be shoved in a locker and tossed off the bridge; the first wouldn't join if they thought 95% of the wars they would get deployed to were unjust, as they'd only see themselves as instruments of murder and not heroes fighting for freedom.
In other words: people who worship glorious, heroic veterans of wars
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anonymous COWARD??!! Seriously?
We live in a country where it is almost a sin worse than murder to say that you blame all who participate in unjust wars -- to say that those who fight are, as beings with some level of intelligence, at least enough to drive and feed themselves, culpable for the choices they make. And you can't even attach your own name to your "support the troops" tripe? Talk about a coward.
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I blame the soldiers and the leaders. They are both at fault. Unless the soldiers have an IQ of about 50, they are culpable for their acts.
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One of those strange rules of war. (Score:5, Informative)
Yes. That is exactly the rule. Weapons that are intended to injure but not kill are illegal, weapons intended to kill are ok. Injuring someone because you tried to kill them and missed is considered acceptable, because not everyone has perfect aim.
In world war 1, countries invented poison gas, which caused blindness and severe lung damage, leaving huge numbers of soldiers badly injured but alive, exactly when battlefield medicine was advancing enough to cause soldiers who were losing an arm or a leg to be far more likely to survive.
This caused everyone to realize that poison gas was an amazing weapon for destroying the enemy country for the next two generations by INJURING soldiers -- all the 18 year old guys who are blind and have bad lungs from your gas attack go home, and are a drag on the economy for 50 years by being unable to work and on intensive health care... Civilized countries take care of their veterans, so you know your enemy would deal with the cost... but a world war with unlimited use of these weapons causing millions of badly injured veterans would basically cripple the economies of winners and losers alike.
Thus, after the war, everyone decided that before the chemists finished perfecting gas weapons, we should all agree to ban them. Laser weapons for blinding, as soon as those became vaguely practical, got the same treatment. Other, more obscure types of weapons get this treatment too.
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This is the sort of rational and realistic responses with pertenant historical insight sans the common snide, cynical, partisian, or whack-job comments. It is on-topic, concise, and detailed. It answers a common question that would be raised by the uninformed about the topic at hand.
And it's not upvoted at all. Come on mods, do the hard-work of setting that slider all the way to zero and look for things that deserve mod points.
And you, coward, get a name so this sort of thing is easier to spot.
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That actually makes sense.
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Yes. That is exactly the rule. Weapons that are intended to injure but not kill are illegal, weapons intended to kill are ok. Injuring someone because you tried to kill them and missed is considered acceptable, because not everyone has perfect aim.
No, that is not correct.
The Hague and Geneva conventions forbid "To employ arms, projectiles, or material calculated to cause unnecessary suffering"
There are endless misconceptions regarding the Hague and Geneva conventions. Please read the actual text of the Conventions and updates. There are many surprises such as the circumstances that allow the execution of random civilians as punishment for the behavior of others.
Here is a link to the Hague Convention.
"Annex to the Convention: Regulations respecting th
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You can kill, but you cannot torture. Blinding somebody for life intentionally is cruel and hence unacceptable. Not that such distinctions are understood in the US.
This is just fucked (Score:4, Interesting)
This plus the microwave weapon that makes you feel like you're on fire for "Crowd Control" - oh, no one would ever use it to "interrogate" someone, I'm sure.
What a sick fucking world we've created, or have allowed to be created by silent consent. Getting tear-gassed in the 60's was all for nothing, we were all just a bunch of idealistic assholes; we shoulda just kept our mouths shut and concentrated an getting rich, then we could be doing the burning and the blinding. What a colossal species fail we are.
I welcome that killer asteroid.
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I welcome that killer asteroid.
Not I. I'd rather the rich elite kill off all of us poor idiots that think that wisdom has meaning. That way they would have everything that they want. Then I want them to really feel that. I want their lazy, inconsiderate, reckless, venturesome, belligerent ways to only be with them, and I don't want to be here when this all goes down. Because just like anyone else that's always pointing their fingers at everyone, hating them, trying to get everyone to do things that they want, the way they want, when
Re:This is just fucked (Score:5, Insightful)
You think that 1 out 2 protesting hippies in the 1960's went on to start a management career or entered politics?
I think your memory is about as good as your sense of statistics.
Long story short, the hippies were right. There really WERE communist spies infiltrating our government and society. But it didn't matter, because our system was better than the communist one. We didn't have to go off on pointless wars and trod on the necks of foreigners because, given time, our system won out, their collapsed, and all the satellite nations that they held sway over converted to our system. We didn't have to keep black and whites from marrying. We didn't have to dissolve Turing's nuts. We didn't have to hand guns to the contras just because the leader wanted to think about socialism. And we didn't have to have rebels invade Cuba. These are things that, with 20/20 hindsight, were bloody fucking stupid to support at the time. And the people protesting them, the hippies getting tear-gassed, were right. They had a more accurate world-view.
Sadly, the allure of being authoritarian jackboot-thugs never really went away, and it's coming back. Cops are decked out in military gear, our leaders are defending torture and assassinations, and widespread dragnets aren't being shot down.
The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. I think we need another wave of hippies. Unfortunately, their tent-camp was dispersed.
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If you don't see, it's because you aren't looking.
OTOH, I will agree that not anything like all of the protestors of the 1960s & 70s were basically idealistic. Many just didn't want to die in a war they could see no justification for. How terrible.
Perhaps the worst thing to come out of the Vietnam War was the abolition of the draft. Now nobody with power has to even notice that unjust wars are being perpetrated, and certainly they don't feel a direct affect on their children. Perhaps if they did thi
How long 'til mirrors are considered weapons? (Score:5, Interesting)
After all, you could turn the cops laser right back at him...
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They will have polarized glasses.
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Hopefully true, but have you ever looked through welding goggles? While they will protect your eyes, you'll have no way to see. I suppose the only way to make goggles work, would be with a camera connected to LCDs -- pretty expensive to outfit a few thousand protestors.
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That's why you use a "google glass" like thing. You don't use welding goggles, you use something totally opaque, and look at the world through a video camera.
But it only works after you're expecting it.
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Hopefully true, but have you ever looked through welding goggles? While they will protect your eyes, you'll have no way to see. I suppose the only way to make goggles work, would be with a camera connected to LCDs -- pretty expensive to outfit a few thousand protestors.
Lasers are monochromatic. You can design goggles that will effectively block a particular laser wavelength while not overly diminishing the rest of visible light.
The police know what wavelengths their lasers use in advance, and can come to the party prepared. Protesters would have to use the welding glasses and be blind anyway, or they would have to guess which laser wavelength to protect against.
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Umm... simply come with a set of glasses and put on the ones your enemy wears?
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Umm... simply come with a set of glasses and put on the ones your enemy wears?
I'm not an expert on laser goggles, but I'm not sure that you can tell just by looking from a distance. Sure, some are obviously different in color, but what I don't know is whether there are 12 different types of goggles that all look orange-ish and how much protection you get if you pick the wrong one.
Plus they aren't very cheap - it might cost you $35-100 to acquire each one, and you might need a dozen for complete coverage.
That said, if the companies selling this gear publish their specs you might find
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Well, it costs multiple thousands for the laser, so I guess after the first use you know for sure which ones your enemy will field.
How are governments REALLY getting around the ban? (Score:3)
As long as the UN uses the same tactics to stop this research as they're using to stop the Russian invasion of Ukraine or the Israeli settlements in the West Bank, nobody cares what they say.
FTL (Score:2)
I am just glad that the governments are still respecting the FTL weapons ban.
Like to hear a great travesty? (Score:2)
'Law enforcement'.
Lethal force (Score:2)
Is lethal force justified when cops start going around causing permanent blindness and life-long disability? Because my 357 thinks it probably is a reasonable level of self defense.
Whoops, Sorry (Score:2)
Will it pop popcorn? (Score:2)
Obligatory "Real Genius" reference. "Your mother puts license plates on your underwear? How do you sit?"
It'll be the new fashion trend... (Score:2)
After hoodies, welding glasses.
Re: (Score:2)
one of those is not like the others, one of those just doesn't belong..