The different parts of your body use electricity to communicate with one another. The basic idea of a stun gun is to disrupt the communication system. Stun guns generate a high-voltage, low-amperage electrical charge. In simple terms, this means that the charge has a lot of pressure behind it, but not that much intensity. When you press the stun gun against an attacker and hold the trigger, the charge passes into the attacker’s body. Since it has a fairly high voltage, the charge will pass through heavy clothing and skin. But at around 3 milliamps, the charge is not intense enough to damage the attacker’s body unless it is applied for extended periods of time.
It does dump a lot of confusing information into the attacker’s nervous system, however. This causes a couple of things to happen:
- The charge combines with the electrical signals from the attacker’s brain. This is like running an outside current into a phone line: The original signal is mixed in with random noise, making it very difficult to decipher any messages. When these lines of communication go down, the attacker has a very hard time telling his muscles to move, and he may become confused and unbalanced. He is partially paralyzed, temporarily.
- The current may be generated with a pulse frequency that mimics the body’s own electrical signals. In this case, the current will tell the attacker’s muscles to do a great deal of work in a short amount of time. But the signal doesn’t direct the work toward any particular movement. The work doesn’t do anything but deplete the attacker’s energy reserves, leaving him too weak to move (ideally).
At its most basic, this is all there is to incapacitating a person with a stun gun — you apply electricity to a person’s muscles and nerves. And since there are muscles and nerves all over the body, it doesn’t particularly matter where you hit an attacker.
Conventional stun guns have a fairly simple design. They are about the size of a flashlight, and they work on ordinary 9-volt batteries.
The batteries supply electricity to a circuit consisting of various electrical components. The circuitry includes multiple transformers, components that boost the voltage in the circuit, typically to between 20,000 and 150,000 volts, and reduce the amperage. It also includes a oscillator, a component that fluctuates current to produce a specific pulse pattern of electricity. This current charges a capacitor. The capacitor builds up a charge, and releases it to the electrodes, the “business end” of the circuit.
The electrodes are simply two plates of conducting metal positioned in the circuit with a gap between them. Since the electrodes are positioned along the circuit, they have a high voltage difference between them. If you fill this gap with a conductor (say, the attacker’s body), the electrical pulses will try to move from one electrode the other, dumping electricity into the attacker’s nervous system.
