Would a less lethal salt handgun work?

I wrote about a salt gun around the first of the year.  I thought the quasi-child’s toy that should only be used by adults to shoot bugs was a pretty cool invention. Well, recently someone decided to build a salt gun that is supposed to be an actual person stopper. And there’s already been a lot of controversy surrounding it.

Unlike the “toy” gun I mentioned above, this salt gun was listed on a fundraising/crowdfunding website called indiegogo in order to raise money. I saw the initial website before it was pulled down within just 24 hours. According to an article on Inverse.com, there was an anti-violence, anti-gun man out of California, which we all know has stupid anti-gun laws when it comes to guns, who was responsible for taking down the crowdfunding site.

Apparently this anti-gun guy, who isn’t affiliated with the salt gun inventors, decided to rally his 54,000 twitter followers to take the salt gun idea off the Indiegogo site.  Since Indiegogo has a policy of nonviolence and no guns too, the salt gun idea was zapped within 24 hours.

I rarely trust anti-gun gibberish, but according to the diatribe of the aforementioned article by the Twitter guy who hates guns, the salt gun raised $30,000 of it’s $70,000 goal before being yanked off the website for violating the policy of having something related to guns and violence. The policy actually reads, “Campaign Owners are not permitted to create a campaign to raise funds…to cause harm to people or property.” I think the salt gun idea would have been fine, but the plethora of anti-gun emails that must have poured into the crowdfunding site certainly invoked change.

Frankly, after learning about this, I found myself a little sympathetic for the nascent organization just trying to raise a few bucks to get their CO2 air pistol that shoots some type of OC pepper spray into the tactical gun market. But that didn’t last long. Here’s why.

When I first read about the salt gun, before the website was eliminated, I was immediately skeptical. The first thing I read was something that goes in exactly opposite of what a buddy of mine, Matt Graham, inventor of the Graham low-light shooting method,  has said for years. According to the salt gun inventors, the less lethal gun was “designed around the belief that a gun does not have to take a life to protect a life.”

I’ve said it before: Tasers and pepper spray don’t always work.  So, do I think a spin off of the pepper ball guns (basically paintball guns with OC pepper spray balls) used mainly in corrections facilities (jails and prisons), will work well against armed attackers on the street? No way. Never. Violence in at least equal measure must be used against violent attackers. And, more violence wins.

Either a proximity weapon, like a knife or an impact tool, like a metal club, or a stand off tool, like a shotgun, AR, handgun or any other firearm is needed to defend against violence. Of course you could always try to kill an assailant with your bare hands (I know a couple of guys who have had to do just that) but a gun is far superior at stopping an attack immediately, which brings us to what is seriously misinformed about the above statement from the company. The goal in self defense is not to kill, but to stop the threat. More than often, a firearm is necessary to accomplish this task.

Likewise, the salt gun inventors seem to be ignorant of the fact that often when someone gets shot, they don’t die. I cannot even begin to tell you how many people I’ve seen that have been shot that are still alive. I saw a guy once who had been shot in the head only moments earlier still walking around and talking!

So, while I have a little bit of sympathy for the salt gun start-up company that was forced off the crowdfunding Internet site by some anti-gun goofballs, who want protection but don’t have a clue on how to protect themselves, I think the salt gun as a tool is not a tactically smart tool.

Nonetheless, the less lethal gun will likely be appealing to those who think every time someone gets shot, they die.

The views and opinions expressed in this post are those of the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the position of Guns.com.

Latest Reviews

revolver barrel loading graphic

Loading