The Active Denial System

And talking about denial, here is news about a new weapon, which has been given the odd name of the Active Denial System. Steven Poole over at Unspeak points out some of the other Orwellian language used by the military to describe it. As he says, the definition of a non-lethal weapon seems to be one which only kills people by accident.

 

Doubtless it won’t be long before the trickledown effect ensures that the weapon becomes available to criminals and security forces. Then we can probably look forward to reading about it being used to restrain a student trying to gain entry to his university library like this – tasers will be soo last century…