Nettle Briar @Ulfra_Wolfe@awoo.space

Finally, stingballs. Stingball or stinger grenades are newer. They're sort of like smaller flash bangs, loaded with plastic-coated shot that's fired out in every direction. It's sort of like a less-lethal version of a claymore mine. If that sounds awful, it's because they are. In addition to the risks of flash bangs, they also cause rashes of small injures like bloody welts and bruises. They're particularly dangerous to the eyes.

First up is hand-thrown grenades. There are a lot of different types of less-lethal or "crowd control" grenades. The three popular types are currently flash bangs, gas and stingball/stinger. Flash bangs are literally a small explosive charge inside a shell that lets the sound/concussive force out, but doesn't produce shrapnel. Some are perforated plastic, some are metal that banana-peels out upon detonation.

It's another round of large protest events, so I'm going to do something I've done on in the past. A thread on police less-lethals, how to spot them and how cops use them. This is going to include a lot of imagery of weapons, and descriptions of how they can injure or kill someone.

You've probably seen flash bangs on TV. What they don't tell you is that they're some of the most dangerous less-lethals. People get burned by them pretty frequently in no-knock raids, and some can cause injuries bad enough to cost you a limb, which did happen during the NoDAPL protests. (The cops were cooking grenades off so they'd detonate earlier, and one destroyed a water protector's arm.)