Environmentalists: Japanese whalers used sound gun against us!

lrad

How’s this for using exciting, new technology to get your way? Environmentalists have accused Japanese whalers, the most fearsome of all whalers, with attacking them with “sound guns,” such as the kind pictured here. The gun is called an LRAD, which stands for Long Range Acoustic Device. It’s said to cause “nausea, panic and ear damage.” Nothing says “make gentle the life of this world” like smashing people’s brains in with sound, right?

Now, the LRAD is a non-lethal weapon primarily used for crowd control—what The Man does to keep us down!—but the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society said that whalers aboard the Nisshin Maru used the weapon against them. (Never mind that whaling is supposedly banned; Japan claims it stills whales for science, which is like saying a man hits a woman because he loves her.) Two members of the environmentalist troupe were slightly injured during the harrowing ordeal.

The best, as FP Passport notes, is that the whaling crew refuses to acknowledge that the LRAD is a weapon, instead saying it merely sends out “beeping warning tones.”

That’s one thing we really don’t cover here, hi-tech weaponry, but we should. After all, think how many of your tax dollars have gone to the likes of Boeing, Lockheed Martin and Stark Industries to develop instruments of pain and suffering. Go us!

via Foreign Policy Passport