Nonlethal weapons
Nonlethal weapons are weapons, used by police or by the military, whose intended effect is to incapacitate without killing. Their use is controversial. Because different parts of the body differ in vulnerability, and because people vary in their health, weight, and fitness, any weapon powerful enough to incapacitate is likely to be capable of killing under certain circumstances. The phrase is often rendered as "nonlethal" weapons, with the word "nonlethal" in quotes, because the word "nonlethal" refers to the intended effect, not to the potential capability. Sometimes they are referred to as "less-lethal weapons."
During the 1990s and early 2000s interest in various forms of less-lethal weapons has risen, both in military and police contexts. The military is interested in them, in part because the use of less-lethal weapons may, under international law and treaty, be legal in situations where weapons such as lethal gasses are not.
In 2001 the U. S. Marine Corps revealed its development of an Active denial system, an energy weapon said to be capable of heating a target's skin to approximately 130 degrees Fahrenheit in about two seconds. Humans start to feel pain at 113 degrees.
In the 1936 science-fiction movie, H. G. Wells' Things to Come, the virtuous technocrats of the new age drop the "Gas of Peace" from airplanes on their opponents, anesthetizing them and allow them to be captured without harm. Things did not work quite so perfectly on October 26, 2002. Fifty Chechen separatist guerillas, armed with automatic weapons and bombs, were holding seven hundred civilians as hostages in a Moscow theatre. Russian special forces gassed the theatre with an opiate based on fentanyl. Everyone in the theatre was rendered comatose, and the guerrilas were shot at gunpoint. However, a hundred civilians were killed, and while over six hundred survived, some are likely to have permanent disability.
A nonlethal weapon figured in the national news on October 21, 2004 when Victoria Snelgrove, a 21-year-old student, was killed by a pepper-spray-filled projectile. The projectile was fired by police attempting to disperse an unruly crowd celebrating a Red Sox victory. The crowd was said by police to have been setting fires and wrecking cards. The projectile was fired by a compressed-air system similar to those of a paintball gun, the ball hit her in her eye and caused her to bleed excessively. A Boston Globe story quotes unnamed "police officers familiar with the weapons" as saying that the eye socket is the only part of the body where the round can penetrate and cause fatal injury.