Guns Get Serious

Children in the United States are raised differently based on their gender. Girls are given dolls, and boys are given guns. This early exposure embeds guns in our psyche, and leads us to long for bigger and better technology. Traditional bullets just aren’t cutting it these days, we need weapons that shoot cooler things. Engineers have been listening, if you see someone wielding one of the following guns, run.

The Lightning Gun

Shooting fire from a flamethrower has been around for decades and has gotten rather boring. Tasers are entertaining for those on the other end, but the outcome is too predictable. Lucky for us, a gentleman named Rob Flickenger created a gun that could emit over 20,000 volts of electricity. The gun uses Tesla coil technology, originally devised by Nikola Tesla in the late 1800′s. Check out Flickenger’s site if you’re interested how the gun was made. You can also see it in action in the video below. There is no word yet on whether this gun is capable of sucking up ghosts and trapping them in a backpack.

The Zombie Gun

Why would we want this? Do we really want to recreate Resident Evil? Vladimir Putin has given the go-ahead to Russian scientists on a weapon that attacks the central nervous system of Russia’s enemies. Putin says the gun will enable them to “achieve political and strategic goals” and that it “will be comparable in effect to nuclear weapons, but will be more acceptable in terms of political and military ideology.” Hmm. The gun works by shooting microwaves that damage internal organs and brains, “altering psychological states and make it possible to transmit suggestions and commands directly into someone’s thought processes.”

The Ray Gun

This is the only one of the featured guns that supposedly won’t instantly ruin you. You may have seen guns that emit annoying sound waves, and those will even be used at the Olympics this summer. The ray gun lets you feel the pain on your body rather than your ears, while staying alive. The ray gun can fire a 100,000 watt beam at the speed of light. Anyone or anything in the way of the beam will feel a super blast of heat. The Pentagon claims the ray gun induces no serious injuries (but what about if you get blasted for multiple seconds?), it just penetrates 1/64th of an inch into the human body, agitating the nerve endings. The feeling is described as being hit with scalding hot water. The ray gun could be a great way to save lives on the battlefield and if introduced commercially, it could be a valuable tool to keep pesky kids and animals out of your lawn.

Leave it to technology to take the staleness out of the weapons industry. The big takeaways here are that we need to keep these weapons out of the wrong hands, as well as find a safe way to study the long term effects. Let’s hope that these dangerous guns won’t have to be used on one another. A potential future application for these guns would be combating an invading alien force. We now have a plethora of methods to bring them down and save the planet. What other uses can you see for the lightning, zombie, or ray guns?

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