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The Advantages Of Having Weapons That Can Be Set For Stun... Whether You're The Good Guys Or The Bad Guys


Marcus Impudite

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That latter is notable in the Vorkosigan books by Bujold. Ivan Vorpatril, a secondary character in many of the books (and the main one in one), notes at one point that the first rule of stunner tag is shoot everybody. You can always apologize and offer a headache tablet to any friendlies.

 

Adnantage #5 : No firing hesitation.

 

All but the most hardened or well trained personnel will probably hesitate before taking a life. Stun shot? No need to worry about it!

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#7: If you're out to incite terror and cow a population, stunning selected victims and removing makes good sense, so you can kill them in more creative ways in more isolated circumstances and leave the corpses in prominent places for maximum psychological impact.
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And #5 leads logically to

 

Advantage #6: Fewer deaths due to law enforcement.  "Wrongful death" accusations, and all the hostility and unrest they cause, should drop dramatically. Not that police may be any more loved by some segments of the populace, but they might be less feared.

 

Not really (to wrongful death accusations), if someone unfortunately dies from the use of a stun gun, you'll still get sued.  (even if the only other option was bullets) 

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • 3 weeks later...

That latter is notable in the Vorkosigan books by Bujold. Ivan Vorpatril, a secondary character in many of the books (and the main one in one), notes at one point that the first rule of stunner tag is shoot everybody. You can always apologize and offer a headache tablet to any friendlies.

 

Adnantage #5 : No firing hesitation.

 

All but the most hardened or well trained personnel will probably hesitate before taking a life. Stun shot? No need to worry about it!

Also noted in that series was the drawback of being armed ONLY with a stunner: enemies won't hesitate to try to overwhelm you with numbers, then stomp you to death.

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Also noted in that series was the drawback of being armed ONLY with a stunner: enemies won't hesitate to try to overwhelm you with numbers, then stomp you to death.

And if your opponents are immune to stunners (like robots), you are generally weaponless against them. Stunning all new arrivals to make sure they're human in that way may be part of the protocol for vetting new personnel, to try to deal with e.g., the Cylon problem.
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And if your opponents are immune to stunners (like robots), you are generally weaponless against them. Stunning all new arrivals to make sure they're human in that way may be part of the protocol for vetting new personnel, to try to deal with e.g., the Cylon problem.

...Of course. It's not like Cylons would want to turn into inferior biologicals. That would be the plot of a B-grade survival horror. Probably end with most viewers wanting half the cast dead, anyway.

 

Tax:

12) Laser tag gets a whole lot more fun.

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The vorkosigan series has a lot of stunner use.

 

with the standard offensive weapons being either instantly lethal incredibly destructive or both.

 

Which means stunners are a popular choice for personal defence and stunner tag is the default for a lot of combat.

 

stun everything that moves and sort things out later is the name of the game.

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