Electrical wizards - could stun guns be lethal weapons if manufactured specifically..

[Stand_Watie]

with the intent to kill?

No particular reason for the question, except I just saw a video of "Chad Vader, day shift manager", and it made me question if we have current technology that is "light saber" equivalent in terms of lethality.

To restate the question, could you put the voltage/amperage in a "stun gun" of the size/weight of those on the market today, that would be generally lethal?

 

[Hkmp5sd]

Yep. You'd need a Tazer type gun to fire probes. You need them far enough apart to get the current to pass through the heart.

 

[Crosshair]

All you would have to do is redo the circutry to decrease the voltage and up the amperage as well as make it a steady current. You may need a bigger battery than what is provided. It would not be as compact as a regular unit, but you could easily make a lethal stun gun if you had the time and money to do so. Heck, I could make a lethal stun gun out of a 12 volt battery pack, an inverter, and some electrical cord.

Though I have to mention that even this is not 100%. In High School I had an accident in the theater, I took 240 volts AC in one hand and out the other. (1600 watt light dimmer in one hand, bare metal railing in the other.) When I came to I was on the floor of the catwalk with my classmate above me asking if I was OK. I was back to normal after 15 minutes or so but my hands hurt for a awhile after. Though I was lucky that the shock threw me back, because if I had fallen forewards it would have been a 30 foot fall to the stage below.

/I now make DAMM sure the power is off now.

 

[Boom-stick]

The HT lines on a car engine give a nice little tickle as well

 

[geekWithA.45]

Considering how difficult it is to get them to reliably stun....

 

[Eleven Mike]

/I now make DAMM sure the power is off now.

Sissy.

 

[alwilliam]

For sure....in fact some place in my collection I have a "killing stun gun" made by info unlimited,they are still around.

They sold these for about 6 months in made up form and also a higher amp version in kit only form back about 15 years ago. I got the kit ,It was rated in joules and was very high,can not remember what its rateing was.

Its the size of a 4 d cell mag light and uses a weird rechargeable battery..it Sounds like a 45acp pistol shot and will punch a hole in a tin can..no joke.

I bet they still sell the parts to make them. http://www.amazing1.com/

These guys used to sell real crazy stuff but got in trouble about 10 years ago and pulled way back on the crazy stuff...like the car alarm that killed the theif who touched the car a bit over the top and not useful in real life but the used to sell them.A lot of their stuff is gadgets but if you know what your after their parts and some kits are great.

As for this statement made above...."Yep. You'd need a Tazer type gun to fire probes. You need them far enough apart to get the current to pass through the heart"


Look into the new 12ga taser rounds

And just for fun, a interesting paper on tasers and pacemakes but IMO has some great info aside from this ... http://europace.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/eum058v1

 

[CNYCacher]

Tasers and stun guns operate in the tens of thousands of volts range. That much voltage is enough to push a lethal current through your body's relatively high electrical resistance, especially if there are probes that get past the epidermis into wet tissue like with a taser gun.

Based on what I know of electricity, I know that tasers MUST have a current-limiting feature built into them, or else they would be lethal.

 

[JustRick]

CNY, yep, they must have thousands of volts and microamps of power. I Am Not A Taser Designer, but it's pretty obvious we're talking about spark plug power here, lots of high voltage AC with little power. Upping the power will make it more dangerous, but I don't know if you would want to count on it to be lethal. I once grabbed 400VDC across my chest (one lead in each hand from a power supply that was "off" -- the way that "unloaded" guns can accidentally discharge), and survived by falling off the lab stool. I guess a taser-like device with probes under the skin would be more likely to be fatal, but it would still depend on where you hit and the nature of the individual (fat, hit bony area, able to pull the taser out, etc.). Bullets are simpler and more proven.

 

[armoredman]

Amperage kills. 1/8th of an Amp is sufficient to kill a human, based on my old BE/E military training.

 

[3pairs12]

My answer is no you couldn't. You would not be able to get amperage great enough to be lethal out of something the same size/ wieght as stun guns that are on the market today. Amperage is the killer not the voltage. You would have to up sive the leads to reduce resistance. Once you get amperage to a lethal level it would burn through those leads faster than the time it would take to get electricution to occur.

 

[CNYCacher]

My answer is no you couldn't. You would not be able to get amperage great enough to be lethal out of something the same size/ wieght as stun guns that are on the market today. Amperage is the killer not the voltage. You would have to up sive the leads to reduce resistance. Once you get amperage to a lethal level it would burn through those leads faster than the time it would take to get electricution to occur.

The amount of amperage required to kill someone is very very small and doesn't require large wires.

I once grabbed 400VDC across my chest (one lead in each hand from a power supply that was "off" -- the way that "unloaded" guns can accidentally discharge), and survived by falling off the lab stool. I guess a taser-like device with probes under the skin would be more likely to be fatal, but it would still depend on where you hit and the nature of the individual (fat, hit bony area, able to pull the taser out, etc.).

Your skin is an excellent insulator. 400V is not likely to kill you through dry skin contact. Had your hands been wet, you might have felt something a little different. Had the 400V been applied with skin-piercing probes, you might have been in serious trouble because the amperage wasn't regulated below lethal levels on that power supply.

In contrast to your story, I got a nasty jolt from a 12V source because I was in a light rain in a t-shirt and was all wet. I got opposite ends of a car battery in either hand and I felt a jolt as every muscle in my arms and across my back between the shoulders painfully tensed up.

 

[Hkmp5sd]

You would not be able to get amperage great enough to be lethal out of something the same size/ wieght as stun guns that are on the market today. Amperage is the killer not the voltage.

It takes 100 milliamps to kill you. Once you penetrate the skin and get to the nicely conductive blood and guts, where resistance is very low, you can kill someone with 24 volts.

In the Navy, they teach that a person soaked in seawater has a low enough resistance through their skin for 28 volts to be deadly.

 

[Cesiumsponge]

Anyone familiar with electronics knows that a large quantity of energy can be released very quickly in capacitor discharges. There are plenty of high-voltage capacitors that one could hold in your hand that possess sufficient energy storage in the hundreds of joules range (defibrillator units run about this) and a high enough working voltage that internal resistances and inductance would lend to reasonably short discharge times, leading to very high peak currents that can vaporize wires, cause burns, and induce things like cardiac arrhythmia. Plenty of people have been killed by unintentionally discharging capacitors.

 

[NameMyName]

well pure water (H2O without any other elements) is has a very high resistance, water is just a good conductor because of the NaCl and other elements and compounds. Anyways, its not the voltage, but the current which kills you. The tazer is basically a sparker connected to some batteries hooked up an amplifyer and dishes out high voltage, but with very low current because they dont want you to kill anyone. The tazer does not kill, but if you could have more current like the guy said above me, with 28 Amps, its lethal enough to kill easily.

 

[Limeyfellow]

28 Amps? Christ, 5 Amps generally starts to set you on fire internally. I would think about half an amp for say 5 seconds is usually enough to make it quite lethal. You would need to puncture the body to get inside with the probes. This drops the body resistance to about a 300-1000 ohms. That means you want about 150-500 volts for say 10 seconds would take care of most people. The probes would melt long before then anyway.

 

[quatin]

I think tazers uses pulses. It's not a constant 10kV. It switches on and off just enough to get you to spasm, but not long enough to burn tissue and nerves.

Wires 1/8th of an inch in diameter should pass more than 10amps. A 9V battery should be close to 500mAh and could probably discharge close to an 1A of current at 9V for 10 minutes. It should be more than enough to kill someone if you can hook it up to a person so that it passes through the heart. This of course would be the tricky part.

 

[Stevie-Ray]

28 Amps? Christ, 5 Amps generally starts to set you on fire internally. I would think about half an amp for say 5 seconds is usually enough to make it quite lethal.

Absolutely. I've taken 277V a few times, 440V once, and 240 once. Worst I've ever had was 110V drawing 2 amps. That one went through my finger, up my arm all the way to my shoulder and I thought my arm would never stop shaking, and I doubted the feeling would ever come back in it. The shock was no longer than a second, but the memory will last forever. It should have killed me. One of my bosses rested his entire arm across a live 440V AC crane hot rail. He immediately stiffened and that kicked the ladder out from under him. Instead of the fall killing him it saved his life. Another buddy of mine poked his hand under an old 440V starter to bypass the safeties and bump a motor and took a poke that lifted his legs out from underneath him dropping him on his ass. I admonished him, asking what were the odds of taking a poke if he'd simply put on his gloves. He said, "considerably less." We electricians are a crazy bunch. It's as dangerous as getting shot. There's no taking it back.