Non-lethal weapons: what is the Lanús experience like?

In Argentina, the Buenos Aires municipality of Lanús is the first to use the new non-lethal weapons and place them in the hands of the Citizen Security teams. They are Bersa air rifles and pistols called “Byrna”. This type of weapon uses a compressed air system to fire 68 caliber projectiles that use kinetic force to knock out the aggressor.

Diego Kravetz, interim mayor of the municipality of Lanús, appreciated its application and managed to use it. “They are useful when there is no firearm in the middle, in case it can be a knife, or a person who can be out of control,” he clarified in an interview with Cadena 3 radio.

“What this type of weapon does is reduce the attacker with much less chance of death and without harm to third parties,” he argued.

He recalled a recent case where the Citizen Security forces managed to reduce a person “who was not in his right mind” through the use of new weapons. “There was a call to a local 911, and they dispatched cell phones after warning that there was an aggressive person with a knife who was threatening people,” he recounted.

“Our mobile phone arrives first, calls out and the aggressor does not stop in his attempted aggression, so we proceed to use this non-lethal weapon, which is the Byrna, which has two types of ammunition, the impact one and the pepper spray; three impact projectiles are thrown at him and with that he is immobilized, with which the weapon worked well for us and the protocol was well exhibited,” he said.

In this case, the use of the non-lethal weapon helped to subdue the deranged person without killing them.

In the case of demonstrations, the mayor valued this type of weapon considering that “it is a less problematic alternative than the shotgun because it shoots rubber pellets and a handful of ammunition comes out and can hit the aggressor and also a third party”, clarified.

Comparing them with Tasers, he admitted that “it is a weapon that works”, although at the time of acquiring “the Byrna does not require any authorization and it is much cheaper,” he reflected.

The forces and their training

Then they said that after training, they put together a protocol and gave the weapon “to the best troops and we started from there to see if we found the utility that we needed and up to now it has worked very well for us.”

And he concluded: “Practice is essential and a good understanding of what situations do and what is not appropriate. I think we are capturing it well and now we are testing it in our reality, since we are located in the most insecure area of ​​Argentina, which is the southern suburbs of Buenos Aires”.