Your Tax Dollars At Shocking Work

The 12-gauge shotgun taser may be coming soon to a local police force near you. From the AP report:

The eXtended Range Electro-Muscular Projectile, or XREP, will be a shotgun shell designed to combine the blunt-force trauma of a fast-moving baseball with the electrical current of a stun gun.

"It will truly cause incapacitation," company spokesman Steve Tuttle said.

Taser hopes to release the product in 2007. The Office of Naval Research funded the approximately $500,000 it took to develop the shotgun shells, Tuttle said.

That amount actually seem extraordinarily low for government work.

See this April 2005 Reason article by me for some of the concerns with old-style Tasers in the hands of often-reckless cops. And here is the Amnesty International anti-Taser report cited in that article.