Hi Art, I'm not trying to bust on you. Your first post made it sound like there was no difference between a Taser and contact stunner other than the probes, and that's just not so. If I misunderstood what you were saying, I apologize.

I did some digging- yeah, wattage. Lesson here, don't believe the gun rag articles. I had to dig through my back issues, and several of them did clearly say voltage. *blush* My bad for passing on bad data.

My background includes control systems- I've been shocked more than a few times. As I said, it hurts, but it rarely makes your muscle control overload. A few times my hand didn't want to obey me, but I could move my legs and my other hand. The only time I've really lost control was being cheap and stupid and trying to fix a CRT monitor, but that is a LOT more charge than anything we are talking about here. All the contact stunners are is DC, no pulsing, it is like hitting one of those newer, orange wire cattle fences. I've never seen a "stungun" that does what a Taser does, and I've owned and played with several stunners. Even built a couple.

The Tasers use a regulated pulse, it (mostly) jams specific nerves rather than hammering at every frequency. AC of any cycle is different from DC in how it makes your body react, and if you can tune the signal you are going to effectively turn nerves off by remote- or did I completely miss the point of several lectures in college? You are talking about the M18- is this the older one the M26 replaced? If so, the older generation delivered a different pattern of pulses and much less power. Same technology, but not as effective- that is why you have various rather infamous bits of footage with people continuing to effectively resist while being shocked.

You talk about how it "feels"- yes, it hurts. But how something "feels" is a subjective experience, not something that has quantifiable value. Personally, I think 25VDC at an amp hurts a lot more than household AC, but that doesn't mean that either one is less stupid to stick your finger into than the other. That 25V hurts about as much my old 40KV stun gun did as far as I could tell. I've seen pictures of a Taser's signal on an o-scope (nice spikes), and I've put stunners (DC transformer, no surprises when it is flat) on scopes myself- looks different to me. The results based on the body of collected evidence are also different. Ergo, the two classes of devices aren't the same.