Efforts to deter the crisis-level numbers of law enforcement officials fatally shooting people, and not the other way around, nationwide have included the use of body cameras on law enforcement officials, which hasn’t helped at all. California company Alternative Ballistics is now offering an alternative—it’s offering The Alternative, a handgun attachment that makes bullets non-lethal.
The bright orange plastic attachment clips on to the handgun while still allowing the handgun to be used. The Alternative holds a metal sphere at the end of a gun’s barrel, referred to as an airbag, with a design meant to catch a bullet once it’s been shot. Not only does the sphere reduce a bullet’s speed up to 80 percent, it makes it so that the bullet is less likely to pierce you and cause further injury by distributing its points of impact. The Alternative is powerful enough to knock someone down, like a non-lethal bean-bag, but it’s more accurate.
It’s a single-use accessory that “ejects” once the shot has been fired. If a law enforcement official felt the need to continue shooting after using The Alternative they would be able to do so in a heartbeat.
In the end this may save lives, but everyone knows the problems are much deeper and only police reform will change the outcome.
[via Gizmodo]
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