subject: Protecting Yourself Against Assailants With Stun Guns [print this page] "A good number of police officers, soldiers, and even ordinary citizens carry legalized stun weapons to protect against personal attacks. It temporarily puts an assailant out of action without doing any enduring damage.
Here's how the weapon works:
Our nervous system has a lot of network of nerve cells that send electric impulses to the muscles and all the other parts in our body for a certain action. Our brain sends out a command which makes way for the electricity to reach the muscles of the legs when we want to move them. In the case of the sensory nerve cells, sound vibrations are picked up by the eardrum and are sent back to the brain through a network of nerves. The brain is responsible for interpreting such vibrations to a certain type of sound. This is how the different parts of the body use electricity to send messages to one another. Think of it as a telephone system.
Stun guns break off the communication system of the body. Stun guns can create a high-voltage, low-amperage electrical charge. These are like punches but the vital organs in our body aren't pierced. The charge passes through the assailant's body but it is not intense enough to damage his body unless it is applied for extended lengths of time.
But generally, these releases confusing messages to the body of the attacker. There are two things that can happen from this, one is that the neural impulses are mingled by the charge. Imagine running an external current into a phone line. Random noise mixes with the original signal, creating static that garbles the messages. When these communication lines go down, the assailant's brain has a hard time telling his muscles to move, and his senses are baffled and placed out of balance. This can cause immobility.
The other thing that happens is, the current produced may have the same pulse frequency as the body's own electrical signals. This means that the brain will send a lot of messages to the muscle which makes the body of the attacker do a lot of work in a short period of time. The body of the assailant will be twitching and jerking because the movements will not be focused on a certain action. What it does is deplete the energy reserves of the assailant. This would leave him too weak to manage to move.
This is how the stun gun works to incapacitate an assailant by applying an electrical charge on the muscles and nerves. And because there are muscles and nerves all over a human body, it doesn't really make a difference which body part you hit.
