Big new Taser: "America's largest stun-gun manufacturer is working on a new way to deliver electricity to the human body - through 12-gauge shotgun shells. Though it's still being developed, Taser International Inc. says the new product will allow police officers and US troops to hit someone from a much greater distance than its current line of Tasers, which Amnesty International has cited in more than 120 deaths. The eXtended Range Electro-Muscular Projectile, or XREP, will be a shotgun shell designed to combine the blunt-force trauma of a fast-moving baseball with the electrical current of a stun gun. "It will truly cause incapacitation," company spokesman Steve Tuttle said. Taser hopes to release the product in 2007. The Office of Naval Research funded the approximately $677,500 it took to develop the shotgun shells, Tuttle said. The company has been selling its stun-gun weapons to law enforcement agencies since 1998."


"Negroes with Guns": "For me, one of the revelations of Black History Month has been the life of Robert Franklin Williams ... thousands of KKK members met in Monroe met from time to time. After burning copious crosses, they hopped in their cars, honking horns, shooting off guns, and threatening to kill people. The object again: racial terror. During that time Williams had personally started organizing armed squads of black people for self-defense. ... And when push came to shove back in Monroe, when the Klan came raging into the black section of Newton one night, they were met by a cordon of armed black men. The Klansmen panicked and fled every which way. And this was the last time they rampaged through Newton."