Less-lethal weapons offer more options

The Ferguson, Missouri, officer who left his job because of last year's killing of Michael Brown probably won't be sued by the federal government, but the Justice Department may sue the entire police department if it doesn't change tactics Washington sees as "racially discriminatory."

The debate over Brown's death aside, the Ferguson police department is in the spotlight in another development -- adoption of nonlethal, or at least less-lethal weapons.

It seems like a good idea; an officer with only a conventional pistol is like an army with only nuclear weapons in its arsenal.

Sometimes an artillery round or a drone attack would do the job, instead of resorting to a hydrogen bomb.

Tasers are a common alternative to firearms, but they do occasionally kill people, often those with underlying medical conditions.

One type of new weapon, the Triple Defender, fires pepper gas, applies a stun gun and then disorients you with a strobe light.

Another type is a plastic device which slips over a pistol, and when a regular round is fired, propells a plastic-covered steel ball into the target, who probably won't be killed, but who will feel like he's been punched by a champion prize fighter and will probably suffer broken ribs.

Others weapons involve firing a projectile containing pepper gas, a colored liquid to identify suspects or a "malodorant round" to deliver a "highly noxious payload that delivers an appalling odor" to disperse a crowd.

The military is getting into the act, testing a "Active Denial System" that emits a focused beam of radio beams that penetrates the skin, "producing an intolerable heating sensation that causes targeted individuals to flee."

One test subject compared it to the sudden heat of an open oven door, even tyhough she was 3,000 feet from the source of the beam.

The Air Force claims it is not a microwave, is not radioactive and does not cause cancer or infertility, and can only be lethal if energy beam is "sustained and prolonged many times."

We can't blame officers for being reluctant to take a Taser or pepper spray to a gun fight, especially when the bad guys have guns themselves.

But expanding an officer's options always seems like a good idea.