Silence your enemies – use the speech jamming gun

You have to hand it to the Japanese, they love coming up with weird and wonderful gadgets. Researchers have created a new hand held gun which can jam the words of people speaking up to 100 foot away.

The gun has a dual purpose according to the mad scientists behind the development. Firstly it can be used in noise sensitive places, such as libraries, to stop people speaking. The other purpose can be to stop people talking and airing ‘free speech', such as when at public events.

The researchers had planned to create something to stop ‘louder, stronger' voices from saying more than their fair share in a conversation. Their literature says “We have to establish and obey rules for proper turn-taking when speaking. However, some people tend to lengthen their turns or deliberately interrupt other people when it is their turn in order to establish their presence rather than achieve more fruitful discussions. Furthermore, some people tend to jeer at speakers to invalidate their speech.”

The gun works by listening with a directional microphone and after a short delay of 0.2 seconds it plays it back with a directional speaker. This triggers something called ‘Delayed Auditory Feedback (DAF)'. This has been known to interrupt your speech and doesn't cause physical discomfort.

Other publications, such as ExtremeTech have some views on the matter “Suffice it to say, if you’re a firm believer in free speech, you should now be experiencing a deafening cacophony of alarm bells. Let me illustrate a few examples of how this speech-jamming gun could be used.

At a political rally, an audience member could completely lock down Santorum, Romney, Paul, or Obama from speaking. On the flip side, a totalitarian state could point the speech jammers at the audience to shut them up. Likewise, when a celebrity or public figure appears on a live TV show, his contract could read “the audience must be silenced with speech jammers.”

Then there’s Harrison Bergeron, one of my favorite short stories by Kurt Vonnegut. In the story’s dystopian universe, everyone wears “handicaps” to ensure perfect social equality. Strong people must lug around heavy weights, beautiful people must wear masks, and intelligent people must wear headphones that play a huge blast of sound every few seconds, interrupting your thoughts. The more intelligent you are, the more regular the blasts.”

Kitguru says: I am thinking of buying one to silence a dog next door who often likes to wake me up at 3am.

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