It occurs to us that there might be an ideal way for Americans to get around restrictive gun laws in places like Washington D.C., where even after losing big time in the U.S. Supreme Court, the city government is doing all it can to prevent law-abiding individuals from obtaining handguns to protect themselves.
The answer for law-abiding individuals is to stop using handguns altogether and to instead exercise their right to defend themselves and their families from people who would do harm to them by packing heat. Real heat. They should leapfrog handgun technology altogether and go straight up the technological food chain and begin using rayguns for the job of personal self-defense.
Think that's entirely science fiction? Wired's Noah Schactman reports:
In June 2006, in tests at Sandia National Laboratories, ray gun researchers at Raytheon did something extraordinary. It had been accepted wisdom in the laser community that 100 kilowatts was the minimum power required for battlefield-strength blasters -- a level that hasn't been hit (yet). But in these tests, the Raytheon crew managed to zap a couple of mortar rounds, using a bundle of fiber lasers that only had 20 kilowatts of power. Not only that, it's beam quality was terrible: Spread out all over the place, instead of in a nice, tight spot. So how did they pull it off? It turns out that the laser's weakness -- its lousy beam quality -- was also its strength. By spreading out the laser's spot, the weapon has [sic] able to heat the mortar up -- and cause it to explode. Think of it like an explosive potato, left too long in a laser oven.
Now, think of encountering a felon, in your home, who is freely able to threaten you and your family with a gun just because your local government has put an extraordinary number of barriers in your way to lawfully getting a gun of your own to protect yourself. Now imagine if you had a working version of one of Dr. Grordbort's Manmelter 3600ZX Sub-atomic Disintegrator Pistols (pictured above). They're likely not covered by your local anti-gun ordinances and even more likely couldn't be without also banning a lot of laser technology already in widespread use, like those laser speed guns the police use for local government revenue enhancement. In our scenario, what happens next is the pretty much the same as what typically happens whenever people armed with inferior technology encounter those armed with superior technology: the people with the inferior technology cease to be a threat.
You might not even need to make them explode! Just the possibility of that outcome alone ought to dramatically increase the odds that they will either run away or give up. Just as if you hadn't been prevented from having an old-fashioned slug-throwing gun to defend yourself by those arcane and now unconstitutional anti-gun ordinances.
Sure, having a bullet-firing gun might deliver the same result, but you still have to admit that our suggestion is way cooler!
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