Great Moments in Crowd Control

It was only a couple of weeks ago that I read H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds for the first time, after seeing the Steven Spielberg movie and hoping that in Wells’ original, the permanently screaming Dakota Fanning character would meet a brutal and hideous end. But no, even better — her character isn’t in the book at all.

However, Wells did mention the “heat ray,” an amazingly prescient idea for a late-nineteenth-century man. Unlike the versions you see in the movies, the original heat ray was invisible; you couldn’t see it coming and had no idea it was there until the heat made you burst into flames.

Now, just over a century later, the United States government has caught up with Wells’ imagination and unearthed an invisible heat ray of its own. It’s called the “Active Denial System,” which sounds much better than the “turn protestors into charred lumplets of carbon system.”

I’m exaggerating, of course. Our government surely won't turn the heat-ray all the way up to “charred carbon” mode. No, we’re told that the heat ray will be another “non-lethal” weapon like the Taser (currently being blamed for at least 74 deaths, according to Amnesty International, though other online sources claim the number is much higher).

I remember when the Taser was first introduced. Its proponents said it would be a safe and humane alternative to guns; instead of shooting and possibly killing a bad guy, the cops would simply Taser him. But read what Amnesty International has to say about the Taser and its use:

many US police agencies are deploying tasers as a routine force option to subdue non-compliant or disturbed individuals who do not pose a serious danger to themselves or others. In some departments, tasers have become the most prevalent force tool. They have been used against unruly schoolchildren; unarmed mentally disturbed or intoxicated individuals; suspects fleeing minor crime scenes and people who argue with police or fail to comply immediately with a command. Cases described in this report include the stunning of a 15-year-old schoolgirl in Florida, following a dispute on a bus, and a 13- year-old girl in Arizona, who threw a book in a public library.

In many such instances, the use of electro-shock weapons appears to have violated international standards prohibiting torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment as well as standards set out under the United Nations (UN) Code of Conduct for Law Enforcement Officials and the Basic Principles on the Use of Force and Firearms by Law Enforcement.

Remember back in college, when you’d go to a party and there was always that one paranoid guy ranting about how the US was on its way to becoming a scary police state? Damn, I miss the days when I could dismiss him as having simply taken one bong hit too many.