Use the "King of Pain" Setting

For years, the Air Force and the Pentagon's Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate have been working on the Active Denial System, or ADS. It's a real-life ray gun which shoots 95 GHz millimeter waves. They penetrate a 64th of inch beneath the skin, where nerve receptors are concentrated. And when the waves hit, they produce an "intense heating sensation [which] stops only if the individual moves out of the beam’s path or the beam is turned off," a Sandia press release explains. "The sensation caused by the system has been described by test subjects as feeling like touching a hot frying pan."

It's a pretty damn persuasive way to get people to clear out of the way. And unlike, say, an M-16 fired into a mob, the beam's only lasting effects seem to be bad memories. No wonder folks are calling ADS "the Holy Grail of crowd control."

Raytheon has built a Humvee-mounted model, which is currently being tested before a likely trip to Iraq. The Air Force is developing an airborne version of the pain ray.

And those are doubtless the lowest settings.

This would be why a laser would be a lousy weapon, particularly in night situations with a high degree of smoke or fog, where a coherent visible light path would be both dissipated and tracable.

It's hard to use a weapon that gives away your position.

On the other hand, microwaves are invisible.

Of course, the Pentagram Pentagon will doubtless Classify this for National Security purposes at the same time they brag about it along with the Raytheon sales reps, who are doubtless also getting a good price for the technology from the Chinese, the Russians, the British, the French, and the Germans.

The Japanese doubtless have a smaller more efficient model they built ten years ago for their Godzilla flicks.

The North Koreans already bought theirs from the Pakistanis who obtained the plans from bin Laden and bin Talal.