Yesterday, Senator Ted Cruz held a hearing on the threat Antifa and anarchist violence posed to this country.
Cruz noted that not one Democrat senator at the hearing condemned any of the violence carried out by Antifa, blaming the federal government and right win provocateurs.
I will cover this hearing more in the future.
One of the things that stood out to me was this bit of testimony:
.@HomelandKen says that out of 277 injuries to law enforcement officers from rioters, 113 have been eye injuries from lasers. pic.twitter.com/ez2MC0YmTr
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) August 4, 2020
That is 40% of all officer injuries were laser eye injuries.
Laser eye injuries are permanent. The laser burns the retina, causing partial to total vision loss. A laser pointer of only a couple of hundred mW can cause permanent eye damage in fractions of a second.
Quite often this sort of quick exposure results in the victim having a scotoma, a spot of vision loss inside their normal field of vision.
These are debilitating injuries. Victims may lose the ability to drive or do other tasks, and they may cost law enforcement officers their jobs.
This is a major problem for law enforcement.
There are two things that need to be done.
First, officers must immediately be issued laser safety glasses as part of their PPE.
(I recommend adding some to your kit at well. These are the ones that I want because they are also ballistic rated.)
Second, lethal force must be authorized to combat blinding laser weapons.
I should remind you at this point that blinding laser weapons are prohibited on the battlefield by the 1995 Protocol on Blinding Laser Weapons.
The general standard for the use of legal force is to defend against “death or grave bodily harm.”
I would absolutely consider permanent blindness by having your retinas burned with a 500 mW laser to be grave bodily harm.
The fortunate thing for LE is that lasers are line-of-sight weapons, so it’s easy to trace back to the source.
It needs to become SOP that when a bright green laser is shined in an officer’s face, overwatch puts a bullet through the rioter with the laser pointer.
Watch the threat of blinding laser weapons vanish as soon as Antifa learns that law enforcement doesn’t fuck around with people who try to blind them.
I posted in a private chat last week, “I never thought I’d be searching for ballistic rated laser protective googles, but here we are in 2020” and I found those same Revision glasses, but with slightly different lenses. There are also some ballistic rated laser glasses that have been issued to the military which are inexpensive but not as good as the Revisions.
It’s only a matter of time before protesters start using those lasers on drivers who don’t turn around at their “roadblocks” or whatever they’re calling them today, so I want a couple of pair in each vehicle just in case.
https://crimethinc.com/2020/08/03/tools-and-tactics-in-the-portland-protests-from-leaf-blowers-and-umbrellas-to-lasers-bubbles-and-balloons#lasers
There’s a lovely “how to riot more effectively” and it suggests using 4w blue lasers because they’re more effective
Couple points, here.
One: I actually have a decent pair of green/blue blocking laser safety goggles (great if attacked with a blue or green laser, or IR for that matter; not much use against red). Worn at night, they’d make everything very dark indeed. (I wore them under a shade 10 helmet to stare at an eclipse a few years back; the sum of the attenuations was just about enough.) If confronting a nocturnal mob, you have a choice between potentially being blinded with a laser, or effectively blinding yourself with eye protection. In defending a fixed position, a good bank of floodlights might help (as well as dazzling any attacking mob).
If you know the exact wavelength of the laser you’ll be attacked with, maybe you can get narrowband goggles that don’t dim the world so much…?
Two: If memory serves, back when both laser pointers and laser gun sights were first becoming semi-common the California legislature passed a law creating the presumption that any laser pointed at a cop had a firearm attached to it. (That was a long time ago, and my memory is foggy, but it was something along those lines.) This might be a good rule to adopt with regard to mob situations, especially if it’s too dark to see what the laser might be mounted on.
And then there’s this, and others like it for rifle and pistol:
http://looserounds.com/2020/08/04/viridian-hand-stop-laser/
Blinding issues aside, any laser could easily have a firearm at the source pointing along the beam.
One thing to look for in laser safety goggles, is side coverage. The problem with the goggles is, if they work as they should you will not see the beam (or, more accurately, scattered light from the beam), so it can become easier to accidentally put the beam into a gap in your coverage. Perhaps not so much with the ones J.Kb references, but for those of us who wear prescription eyewear it can be an issue. (And for some of us, the prescriptions do not translate well, or at all, to custom lenses for things like side-wrap glasses. So we’re stuck with over-the-glasses goggles.)
I posted on this last week. I concur with your opinion.
http://street-pharmacy.blogspot.com/2020/07/is-deadly-force-authorized.html?m=1
Well now that I know that exists I have to buy one. :/
😀
Another source: https://www.edmundoptics.com/f/laser-safety-eyewear/39552/
The obvious question is what the attenuations specs are for the glasses you’re looking at. I didn’t see them on that web page, and that makes me wonder if these are substantially better than simple sunglasses. It’s certainly possible, and the prices of real protective glases such as Edmund Optics sells are comparable, somewhat to my surprise. But it’s worth asking questions.
Sunglasses are not laser glasses. The attenuation for good laser glasses is 100% at specific wavelengths.
No, laser glasses do NOT attenuate by 100%.
This is why there are different types of laser safety glasses available, with different attenuation factors (optical densities), depending on the wavelength, and power (for CW lasers) or pulse energy, pulse duration and rep rate (for pulsed lasers).
Think of it like personal armor … different armor class ratings for different threats, and nothing stops everything.
J, I understand the difference, that was precisely my point. I did not see a spec saying these were more than colored sunglasses. Boris pointed them out, thanks. The Edmund glasses I referenced come in many variations, in general with better specs (OD often 5 or 6).
Well, better is relative. 🙂
Another parameter that’s important is percentage of visual light transmission (VLT) across the whole spectrum. ThorLabs will list those for its laser glasses, and around 50% for OD4-ish multi-line glasses is probably doing well … going to Eric’s point above about making it harder to use at night.
Which, if you think about it, blocking 99.99% (OD4) around a specific laser line, and letting through half of the remaining visible light, is pretty selective. Generally, multi-line glasses result in lower VLT; and higher ODs, especially for those intended for pulsed lasers, also tend to give lower VLT.
One thing also to consider, if you wear laser line glasses when driving, you might wind up blocking out the green light from an LED stoplight, and possibly much of the yellow depending on how the OD is achieved.
“One thing also to consider, if you wear laser line glasses when driving, you might wind up blocking out the green light from an LED stoplight, and possibly much of the yellow depending on how the OD is achieved.”
Ah! I hadn’t thought of that one, but it’s definitely a consideration. A year or so back, last time I had my eyes dilated, I wore the laser goggles for the ride home (I wasn’t the one driving), and colors were interestingly different. Some trees still looked green, and some didn’t… and some colors of car paint were unrecognizable. I wasn’t looking at traffic lights, so I wouldn’t have noticed if the green ones disappeared.
Yeah … spend a day in a laser lab with eye-pro, and by the end your mind will adapt so things look mostly normal. Then when you go outside and take the glasses off…
Not that I ever felt a particular desire to try LSD, but after that period in my career I feel I’ve gotten the effects anyway.
I misread your comment. Depending on the lens they rate from an OD6 to and OD2.5.
I found others that are cheaper, OD6 for green lasers and NIR, designed for a KTP laser pointer, and are Z87+ impact rated, which makes them equivalent to a decent pair of shooting glasses.
https://www.phillips-safety.com/shop/laser-safety/laser-safety-glasses/shop-by-laser-filters/polycarbonate-filter-lenses/argon-ktp/argon-ktp-model-17001/
The specs are listed near the top, but not repeated down below where one might expect them. In any case:
405nm OD4, 445nm OD4, 532nm OD4)
OD stands for optical density, and each OD reduces the intensity of light by a factor of 10. So an OD4 is attenuating the light by 10,000 times.
For anyone interested, here’s a reasonable overview (modulo a few typos):
https://www.phillips-safety.com/2016/07/how-to-calculate-optical-density-for-laser-safety-glasses-for-maximum-protection/
Here’s a handy little calculator for determining OD based on laser wavelength, power, and pulse format:
https://www.lia.org/evaluator/od.php
It suggests that the goggles listed above are good for up to 10W lasers.
Keep in mind this is an estimate, and I usually (pending review by the laser safety folks at work) bump up the OD by 1 to provide a margin of additional safety.
What I’ve been saying for some time. Blinding laser attacks authorize a lethal force response.
In Oregon, ORS (Oregon Revised Statutes) chapter 161 contains the legal justifications for self-defense. ORS 161.015 has the definitions, and here are the relevant ones (bold emphasis mine):
(1) “Dangerous weapon” means any weapon, device, instrument, material or substance which under the circumstances in which it is used, attempted to be used or threatened to be used, is readily capable of causing death or serious physical injury.
[…]
(3) “Deadly physical force” means physical force that under the circumstances in which it is used is readily capable of causing death or serious physical injury.
[…]
(8) “Serious physical injury” means physical injury which creates a substantial risk of death or which causes serious and protracted disfigurement, protracted impairment of health or protracted loss or impairment of the function of any bodily organ.
Permanent vision damage (i.e. “protracted loss or impairment of the function” of the eye) meets the definition of “serious physical injury”, and so a laser in a riot situation meets the definition of “dangerous weapon”, and the use of the same meets the definition of “deadly physical force”.
ORS 161.209 and 161.219 cover the use of physical force and deadly physical force in defense of a person, and say pretty much what you’d expect: the use of force generally is authorized to the reasonable extent it’s required to stop an attack, and deadly force is not authorized for defense unless deadly force is being used in the attack.
But if laser attacks to the eyes meet the definition of deadly physical force, then deadly physical force is authorized by law in response.
———–
Alternatively, police officers could simply mount mirrors to the front of their riot helmets and behind their (clear) shields — facing forward — and make using lasers a risky endeavor for the rioters.
Watch those Antifa scumbags dissapear when they find out America has stopped fucking around.
I found out about attenuation with optics years ago when I went to pass a car on a two lane road. My guardian angel told me to remove my sunglasses to be sure the coast was clear. Sure enough, there was a car coming opposite direction. With the sunglasses on the car was invisible.
Later that day I did some experimenting to see if it wasn’t just me that hadn’t paid attention. I found it truly was the glasses which attenuated certain colors. Made them completely invisible.