The next Taser could be the one that means police don't need their guns anymore, according to one of the nonlethal weapon's creators, Rick Smith. A new patent shows where his thinking is going.Over the weekend, Minnesota police officer Kim Potter shot and killed Daunte Wright during a traffic stop, leading to protests outside the Brooklyn Center police station.
But Rick Smith, the cocreator of the Taser and now CEO of the $10 billion market cap nonlethal weapon’s manufacturer, Axon, believes his company will make an electric stun gun that will make the police pistol redundant within a decade. “We’ve got to outperform the police pistol. . . . I think we’ll get there, where, by 2030, we’re going to have nonlethal weapons so good, it will actually be a faster time to incapacitation more reliably than a police pistol,” Smith says.
To improve the Taser, it isn’t a case of how to make it more injurious, or more powerful, says Smith. The company needs to figure out how to more effectively get the Taser’s barbs to latch on to a target and deliver the electrical charge, ensuring it gets through thick clothing and has a better chance of hitting a person who might be moving fast or erratically.
A new patent filed by Taser could be a sign of things to come from Axon, which is hoping to make police pistols redundant by 2030.The average police officer might not be the Pollyanna that Smith is when it comes to the future of force. Some won’t want their pistols replaced; others won’t believe a Taser will ever be as effective as a gun. Guglielmi says both his former agencies in Chicago and Fairfax, Virginia, have tried to move to models that focus on the sanctity of life.
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