Hi guys, thanks for tuning in to another video on ForgottenWeapons.com.
I'm Ian McCollum, and today we are taking a look
at a Taser shotgun. This is a Taser X12,
which is a collaborative project between Taser and Mossberg
to produce a less lethal police shotgun version of the Taser.
So a little bit of background first. If you're not familiar with the Taser it's not a stun gun,
the sort of stun gun things that you see that make a nice "bzzzz" snapping noise. That's just painful.
What Taser does is it's a very specific calibrated electronic pulse
that ... is basically the same waveform that the human neurological system uses to control the body.
And so ... when you get hit by it you literally lose physical muscle control ... all over and you can't do anything.
Not because it hurts badly, but because it is
physically interfering with the processing from your brain signalling the muscles what to do.
So it's the sort of thing that you can't like will your way out of, just because of the way it's physically working.
So Taser has of course become a very popular less-lethal police option.
There were some initial concerns about things like heart attacks
that don't appear to actually be substantiated by the research.
And there are in fact a lot fewer side effects to this than some of the chemical sort of less-lethal systems
that are out there, less than some of the physical ones like beanbags and rubber bullets.
And fewer chances of side effects and lingering later effects of things like CS or CN gas.
Anyway, one of the issues with a Taser is that the handheld unit is good to about 35 feet away.
However, you can still huck something at a guy who's 35 feet away pretty effectively,
you can take a big ol' rock the size of, say, a baseball,
and chuck it at a cop who's 50 feet away and stand a pretty good chance of hitting him.
And he can't respond with a Taser, which means if he wants to respond with force,
if he feels the necessity for it, it's going to be a firearm, deadly force.
And Taser thought this would be a really good opportunity to introduce something that had an extended range.
That could basically be effective out to a range beyond which,
or at which, you could no longer really threaten someone by throwing.
So the shotgun version was good out to either 90 or 100 feet, depending on ... which literature you see.
A lot of people say 100, the manual for this specifically says 90.
So that was the concept. Now how do you do that?
Well, with the handheld Taser the projectile that it fires is basically a pair of barbed probes
that hit the target, and the thing is connected by wires to the hand unit.
And that's why it has a very specifically limited range, the wires are only that long.
And there's a battery in the unit, and once the two barbs hit you form an electrical circuit,
and it has the effect that it's intended to have.
With a longer range projectile, what they realised they had to do was build everything into a single unit
... of a size that could fit into a 12 gauge shotgun shell.
And the way this thing works is that when you fire this thing downrange
it's got four barbs in the front, and that will hit a person and stick in them.
This is by the way a kind of painful experience like, yeah, this is not totally hands off,
these things stab into a person. That's what makes the electrical connection.
And that's pretty much it with a handheld unit: two barbs, boom, in, electrical effect, boom you go down.
With the shotgun version the front of the thing hit, but when it was in flight
... basically what happens is the back end of the thing, which contains the battery, has six barbs around it.
And they actually refer to these as "Cholla spines", which those of you who are in the Southwest will recognise.
Those of you who aren't down here in the desert, you may not recognise.
Cholla is this just incredibly malevolent, evil plant covered in little barbed spines. It's sort of a cactus.
But the buds on the Cholla are completely 360 degrees covered in these hooked spines,
and they stick in you and ... you can't grab it and pull it out, because it's all covered in spines.
Well, they kind of made one of those, and it's connected by wire, about this long, to the head of the unit.
So the head hits and then just the ... inertia from this thing flying through the air,
once the head hits it causes this back part to kind of spin around.
And the idea is it'll spin around and it'll hit the person somewhere else, because it's tethered to them.
And no matter what orientation it hits in, those six spines sticking out like Cholla buds,
... one of them will stick into the person and then you'll get your electrical connection.
They went one step, cleverly, further and there are two wires that connect the two parts of the projectile.
One of them is not insulated, it's just a bare wire,
and the idea was a person's instinct upon being hit by one of these things was going to be to grab it and pull it off.
Well, if you grab it, your hand on that uninsulated wire makes the electrical connection right then.
It causes your hand to convulse, and you can't let go of it, and you go down for the count.
So, ... because of its small size, the shotgun version of this projectile had
less power than the handheld version which has a [bigger] battery in it.
This used a 500 volt charge ... transformed down to 1.3 milliamps.
And it gave a 20 second pulse, during which time you're basically immobilised.
So by the way, the reason that we've got this kind of funky-looking vertical front grip thing going on
is because you're not supposed to shoot someone with the Taser shotgun cartridge at less than about 15 feet.
But you might actually need to, and the handgun version of the Taser can be used at point-blank range.
So the idea was if someone's within 15, 20, 30 feet, within the range of the handheld version,
you would use that, holding onto the forend of the shotgun.
Because it's going to be more effective if you're close enough that you can use it.
If someone's farther away, that's when you would use the actual shotgun shell version.
So, there are a couple of very specific differences between this and a regular Mossberg 500.
So let me show you those.
Take a look at the bottom of this first, you'll see that this is a Mossberg Model 500 12 gauge.
However, it has one particular difference from a Mossberg.
Normally the safety on a Mossberg 500 is right up here on the tang, and it's great for left handers.
However on these they deliberately gave them a cross bolt safety, much more like a Model 870,
which is something that police agencies are probably a little bit more familiar with,
and use in greater numbers than Mossberg shotguns.
So they went ahead and did that for the sake of commonality with other guns on the market.
One of the key issues with using a gun like this is you don't want to mix up the less lethal and the very lethal.
You don't want to interchange your Taser rounds and your double-aught buckshot.
So they did a couple things to make sure that that didn't happen.
One is a big ol' logo on the side of the gun, "Taser X12".
The yellow furniture (I apologise for the gunk on it), the yellow furniture was also done for that reason.
To very obviously and quickly identify this as a less lethal firearm.
And the same thing with the pump handle on the front.
You'll notice that they do have this clamp so that you can attach a handheld Taser. We discussed why a moment ago.
Now the bolt is also marked X12 LLS, or Less Lethal Shotgun, or Less Lethal System.
To be honest, I'm not sure exactly what the "S" stands for. At any rate,
the reason that the bolt is specifically marked is because it's not a normal bolt.
The breech face there has an extended ring on it, or a lip on it.
And the purpose of that is to prevent regular 12 gauge ammunition from functioning in the gun.
So kind of like the early Greener-Martini shotguns that were intended for police use in India,
where they didn't want those to be usable if they were stolen.
So they made speciality ammunition with a similar sort of system.
Here Taser wanted to make sure that you couldn't possibly mix up and stuff lethal ammunition
into your bright yellow Taser shotgun and then accidentally kill someone with it.
So this physically will not fire regular ammo.
The problem is that ring, right there above my finger,
will hold a regular cartridge off the face of the breech far enough that the firing pin won't hit.
The Taser shells specifically have a ... matching groove cut into their breech face
so that they'll sit and function perfectly well on that.
This specific bolt face was not the very original idea. At first, the plan was to make the Taser shells
function in any normal shotgun so that ... any police officer with a shotgun
could effectively use these Taser shells as just another item in ... their literal arsenal,
alongside beanbag rounds or lethal ammunition.
They decided that that was perhaps a little risky. They didn't want to be associated with someone
potentially mixing up what ammunition they were using. Which is certainly a possibility.
And so that's why they went to a speciality breech face and a speciality shell.
For what it's worth, they were also at one point considering tinkering with a
40mm grenade launcher version of the system, but they ended up going with 12 gauge instead.
You can just barely see it here, but the barrels for these guns are actually rifled and that makes sense.
This is the sort of projectile that you want to be particularly accurate with, make sure you actually hit your target.
Interestingly, where the regular rate of twist for a 12 gauge slug gun like this would be 1 in 36 inch,
they sped up the twist, and it's actually 1 in 18 inch for the X12 Taser shotgun.
And that's because the projectile is longer and lighter, it's less dense than a solid lead slug.
And it actually needs to spin quite a bit faster to be properly stabilised.
So they went ahead and did that.
And they gave the gun a unique set of sights as well, they have this really big ghost ring sight.
Which is kind of optimised for shooting within about 30 yards,
which is the effective range of one of the Taser projectiles.
The front sight is a front post there, with a nice high-visibility white dot in it.
As far as the magazine goes, the Taser shells work just like regular shotgun shells.
... You can load a magazine of them. They will cycle and feed through the extractor.
This isn't the sort of speciality thing that requires a single-shot gun.
And that was one of the benefits of it was you could load up a tube with
I think 5 of them at once, and have 5 shots at your disposal, should you need them.
This system was introduced onto the market in 2008 by Taser.
And by the way, this is not the exact model of handheld unit
that would have been on this shotgun when it was released.
It's a slightly more modern hand unit, but that's kind of neither here nor there.
Now the project never really went anywhere, largely because of the cost of the Taser shotgun shells.
These things were like 125 dollars apiece ten years ago.
That was about 5 times as much as cartridges for the handheld version.
And this was not a cost that a lot of police departments were able to find justifiable.
The extra range that you would get on this was nice, but ... presumably between the reduced effectiveness
because it was a much smaller electrical package in the shell,
and the extreme cost of the individual shells.
It's one thing to think like, "Oh, a single 125 dollar shell will end an altercation,
and potentially prevent use of lethal force and save someone's life. That's great."
But the reality of the situation for a police department is they're going to have to buy
a tremendous amount of this ammo for training,
and to equip everyone who's on the force who has one of the shotguns.
There's no point to only having one, ... you need it readily available wherever it is needed.
So you have to equip a bunch of people with them, and a bunch of ammo for a bunch of people.
And ... as an overall program the cost just wasn't justifiable, so these kind of went away.
One of the interesting side effects of them, by the way, because they have that special breech face
that will not accept lethal standard shotgun ammunition,
under US law apparently, as far as Taser has informed me, these are not considered firearms.
They're kind of a nothing, kind of like a flare launcher, because they do not fire lethal ammunition.
Interesting little caveat twist there.
Now, this particular shotgun was loaned to me by Deviant Ollam,
if you are interested in seeing him get hit by a Taser and explain what it's like,
you should go over to InRangeTV and check out the video that InRange has posted today.
Karl went over to I believe it's now Axon (renamed, used to be Taser),
went to their factory and has a tour of part of the factory, and the history,
and several people getting an "experience" with a Taser cartridge.
So I'll have a link to that in the end screen of this video, definitely check it out, that's a fun one to watch.
Especially if you're interested in the development of less lethal firearms (in this case) like this one.
Thanks for watching.
[ sub by sk cn2 ]