The governmental mechanisms that exercise a state's physical coercive power – various cadres of military and law enforcement agencies – often face a difficult dilemma. In confrontations with recalcitrant opposing forces of varying sorts, the authorities must recognize that if they exercise too much power, they incur an unacceptable danger of “collateral damage” – unintended casualties to civilians and unnecessary destruction of valuable property. On the other hand, if they exercise too little power, they may risk the safety of their own personnel and compromise the accomplishment of an important and legitimate mission.

In recent years, this dilemma has arisen with painful frequency inside the United States and elsewhere, and officials increasingly express frustration at having only an impoverished array of tools at their disposal, especially regarding confrontations in which the specific target of the police or military forces is intermingled with civilians or innocent bystanders. Government actors may have only “bullhorns or bullets” to choose from – if emphatic verbal instructions and warnings do not suffice, the only recourse is to the application of deadly force, which often cannot be applied with anything like the desired surgical precision.

This book examines that dilemma in the context of the imminent development of a novel toolkit of so-called non-lethal weapons (NLWs), which promise radically to alter the existing Hobson's choice.