Less Than Lethal

Once upon a time I was a prison guard. In a military prison. Villains, thieves and scoundrels to beat the band. One of the assignments I cared little for, was shower-duty. Several of us would tromp on over to Dog Tier and inform the inmates that it was time for a washdown. Now, these were not pleasant men. The usual suspects would spit forth a stream of impressive profanity, then we'd get to work. The cell would be unlocked, we'd wade in with clubs, beat the offending SOB senseless, then drag him to the showers.

All was well until we welcomed a new full bird Colonel as head honcho. He was aghast. We were sooooooooooo brutal. We didn't understand that this was 1973 and not 1473 but by gum he was going to teach us how to. Away went the brick-a-bats, and in came the less-than-lethals. Stun guns. Pepper sprays. Stuff like that. Now, the duty was considered so rough one had to be a former combat Marine to be assigned there, and I'll admit that some of us were, how shall I say, at times a little rambunctious when it came to enforcing the rules.

But what we did do happened to work, and then we had to change over to spraying and zapping when beating and battering was getting the job done. They'd spit at us, attack with homemade weapons, kick, punch, bite, and do whatever they could to inflict as much harm as possible. We'd return the favor, with interest.

Well, the most powerful of pepper-sprays did little to quiet down the hardest of the hard cases, and in fact it made some of them even more difficult to handle. The shock-wands were a little better, but the effects didn't last all that long and nothing is quite as embarrassing as a madman shaking off a good jolt then turning on you like Hannibal Lecter's badder brother. A lot of us started getting hurt, nothing major, but bumps, bruises, a missing tooth here and there, some stitches to tidy things up, stuff like that. Even the ones who didn't usually put up all that much of a fight saw their chance to get a piece of a guard they particularly detested and went down swinging. Pepper spray? Hell, they were going to the showers anyway, and we'd taken to bringing along Corpsmen with their pepper-antidote stuff so they'd surrender, fight, surrender, fight, and on and on it went.

And please now. A shock wand in a puddle of water isn't the smartest thing to be waving around and I never saw a one of them that could put a big man down for the count. Fellow by the name of Fortman was my particular nemesis. 6-7, 300+ lbs of the daily weightlifting variety and he'd break through a sprawl of bodies, see me, and then the fur would fly. Pieces of the two of us splattering around the halls were bad enough but Fort would laugh through a stream of the worst stuff we had and shake and giggle when the shock rods came out. The man cracked more than one of my ribs and if he's still alive I hope he still has that scar where the left side of his nose used to be.

Point was, we were outnumbered to begin with and started taking one beating after another once we left the shotguns behind along with our sap gloves and weighted batons.

So anyway, down to the heart of the matter.

Is pepper spray an effective form of self defense. Sure. If the wind is blowing the right way and you can run like a sumbitch after squeezing off some capsicum. Same with stun guns, although they come in some heavy-duty proportions. Nothing is better than a trained man with a firearm but when all you've got is condiment and zappery, hell, it's better than nothing.