Pepper spray effectiveness

If you think pepper spray will stop an attack then shouldn’t it also make it impossible to drive a car after being sprayed?

At approximately 6:18 p.m. two women in their 50′s were traveling in a car that was stopped at a red light northbound on Martin Luther King (MLK) Jr. Way South at South Graham Street.  Two unknown male suspects approached the victims’ vehicle and assaulted both women with pepper spray in an attempt to steal their car.  The victim driver ran the red light in order to escape, which was successful.

If a middle-aged woman is hosed down with pepper spray and has the presence of mind, will power, and pain tolerance to drive away and call the police then someone intent on doing harm to you can probably continue the attack. Pepper spray will reduce functionality but it will not put healthy adults out of commission.

Giving an attacker the universal hand signal for “LIE DOWN” may still be required even if you carry pepper spray and should be available if needed.

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4 thoughts on “Pepper spray effectiveness

  1. Ehhh. Between us gunnies, that anecdote is okay, but it’s not a particularly good argument in debating between lethal and non-lethal defense tools. There are plenty of gunshot folks who have continued to press an assault, escape and evade, drive to the hospital, etc.

    There have also been plenty of bad guys who stopped the attack after being thrashed with an umbrella, poked with a hat pin, sprayed with pepper spray, or lit up with a few rounds of .45 ACP.

    I do agree that the apex predator in the continuum of force escalation currently is the gun, and should remain so. Until we can set phasers on stun, and sell them only after a background check so bad guys can’t get them. (rigggghtttt…….)

    • Whenever people say they want phasers they can set to stun, I just point out how amazingly easy it would make robbery, kidnapping, rape, and general mayhem – always zap first, do what you need to do, and move on. quick, quiet, little chance of attracting unwanted attention, etc. Think of a teen-ager who snags his mom’s phaser, goes to a pedestrian overpass on a highway, and decides to stun a few drivers just for shits’n’giggles, thinking only of the direct cause-effect (zap, stun) and not the end effect (zap, stun, crash, die). Or think of government-sponsored crowd-control, when the wrong hands are in power. Phasers with a STUN setting are a HUGE can of worms.

  2. But when we debate the disarmament crowd, a single anecdotal incident of an individual who is unable to protect/save/stop the bad incident with a handgun is waved around as if it is the result of such defensive gun use 99.99999999999999999999999999% of the time. When it is a situation like this one, the Leftists can wake up enough to say it may not be part of the great number of likely results.

    This incident is as illustrative of the efficacy of pepper spray as the example of a bad actor taking 6 to the boiler room who proceeds to rape and beat to death the unfortunate victim with her own (now empty) gun before expiring himself.

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