Martin was reportedly “zapped” 17 times for this piece, demonstrating the effects, as well as the possibility that a person could reduce the impact with shields of various materials.

“The gun is really an antenna which shoots out this very high-frequency radio beam that penetrates the skin to a depth of 1/64 of an inch, which is just deep enough to hit the nerves,” says Martin. “And it creates this instantaneous sensation of heat which makes anyone who is hit with it try to get out of the way as fast as possible.

“And the second you do get out of the way, the pain goes away,” Martin continued. “And the point is that this gun, which has a range of roughly half a mile - the exact range is classified - can make you stop whatever it is you’re doing.”

It seems that is the intended benefit of this weapon, which Martin says causes the sensation of being scalded with hot water.

Video here:

http://blog.modernmechanix.com...../#comments

For everyone else:
http://www.wunderland.com/WTS/.....sticks.jpg

////obscure?

http://www.snpp.com/guides/prof.frink.html#6

Grampa: What the hell is that?
Frink: Why, it’s a death ray my good man, behold.
(Frink fires death ray)
Grampa: Hey, feels warm, kinda nice.
Frink: Well it’s just a prototype, with proper funding I’m
confident this little baby could destroy an area the
size of New York City.
Grampa: But I want to help people, not kill ‘em.
Frink: Oh, well to be honest, the ray only has evil
applications. You know my wife will be happy,
she’s hated this whole death ray thing from day
one.

Preemptive attack is more along the lines of a specific superweapon such as nuclear tipped ballistic missiles being used to attack the other sides nuclear tipped balistic missiles. Trying to apply this model to the Gatling gun shows the fallacy of that argument. Of course this all depends on the definition of a “superweapon”

More often, we see that when a weapon is created that would make war more terrible than it already is, the weapon itself is banned. Note how after decades of development the major powers stepped away from the use of biological and chemical weapons (real ones not riot control agents).

As soon as someone else gets the weapon, then both sides begin thinking of preemptive attack.

This claim was more like when in 1864 Victor Hugo stated that airplanes would make armies “vanish, and with them the whole business of war, exploitation and subjugation”. Also kind of like Richard Gatling writing in 1877 “It occurred to me that if I could invent a machine - a gun - which could by its rapidity of fire, enable one man to do as much battle duty as a hundred, that it would, to a large extent supersede the necessity of large armies, and consequently, exposure to battle and disease [would] be greatly diminished.”

Professor May was a busy boy that year. He also claimed to have invented voice recognition in a robot http://davidbuckley.net/DB/His.....ha1932.htm