Chandler Crumblish Paine is a full-time mom and regular jogger who lives in Fort Worth, Texas. She’s never owned a gun, but last year she became increasingly concerned about her safety, especially because she often exercises early in the morning or in the evenings.
“My family has guns, my brothers have guns, my husband has guns. But I just didn’t feel comfortable carrying one,” she tells The Post. So she found an alternative to a firearm, purchasing what’s known as a less-lethal pistol from a brand called Byrna.
The Massachusetts-based company makes pistols — which look a bit like a Glock — that forcefully discharge pepper-spray projectiles or hard plastic pellet spheres.
“One day it just hit me — I’m a young woman out running at 4 a.m. with nothing to protect myself,” she says. “It’s a less lethal option and it will give you a chance to get away if need be.”
Blake Nance, the co-founder of Kodai, a security consulting company in Los Angeles, recently bought a Byrna too. A former Marine and Beverly Hills police officer, Nance has always been comfortable handling guns. Even so, he wanted to find a different option that is unlikely to end someone’s life if he has to use it.
“It’s very similar to a paintball gun and how it uses a CO2 cartridge to launch a projectile that is really painful on impact,” says Nance of his Byrna gun. “I just want something that will allow me to defend myself and just go home.” The Byrna will do the trick in most situations, he believes. “I think it would take the fight out of anybody if they came at you,” says Nance.
Both gun owners (like Nance) and people who say they aren’t comfortable owning firearms (like Crumblish Paine) are fueling a rise in sales of these types of less lethal weapons, which some have called unguns. In 2023, the global “less-lethal” market was estimated to be worth just over $1 billion, according to a report from Grand View Research, which predicts this number will more than double by 2030.
Over the last 12 months, Byrna, for instance, has racked up $100 million in revenue, a record for the 20-year-old business, which is generally considered the first less-lethal weapons company to successfully position itself as a consumer brand. Byrna — whose fans have included Sean Hannity, Lara Trump, Megyn Kelly and Bill O’Reilly — has recently opened a string of retail stores across the country, from Oregon and Arizona to Tennessee, and kicked off a nationwide partnership with Sportsman’s Warehouse. In April, Byrna also launched a new, more compact model, the CL Launcher.
Axon Enterprises, the maker of Taser guns, also targets the consumer market, with two models, the Pulse 2 and the Bolt 2, that it promotes as “personal safety technology.” While the company primarily supplies Tasers for police and military use, Axon vice president Angelo Welihindha says that he sees sales to everyday users as a growth area. “We’re putting more engineering resources than we ever have into the consumer line. It’s a really big bet for the company,” says Welihindha, who declined to share sales numbers for Taser’s consumer models.
Competitors in the projectile launcher market include JPX International, which sells a launcher called the Jet Protector. It fires a projectile that releases a mist of pepper spray that carries a 400,000 rating on the Scoville Heat scale (which is based on the potency of the peppers found in pepper spray). The company, which sells to both police departments and consumers, claims its spray is twice as powerful as standard police pepper spray. Projectile launchers have also become popular with hikers and campers who carry them for protection from wildlife like mountain lions and bears.
These weapons, from launchers to Tasers, sell for between $380 and $595. Most are available throughout the country and can be purchased online. But some cities, notably New York City, restrict their use to inside one’s home and Byrna won’t ship its weapons to NYC.
Scott Brent, the CEO of JPX International, underscores that one of the selling points of less-lethal weapons is the issue of liability, contending that a weapon with bullets is simply riskier to carry.
“Everybody says, ‘Hey, I’ve got a handgun permit,’ ” says Brent. “But let me tell you something, in most situations you’re not going to use a handgun because if you kill or severely injure someone, you’re going to get sued and you could be indicted. You may not be found guilty, but it’s going to completely upend your life.”
Axon’s Welihindha agrees: “A lot of gun owners are getting savvy to the civil consequences of making the wrong choice. They think of the Taser device as something that reduces the consequences if they get that self-defense decision wrong.”
According to Byrna CEO and president Bryan Ganz, gun owners actually account for two-thirds of the company’s customers, while just a third of Byrna buyers are non-gun owners. As Ganz sees it, these two groups are converging on this less-lethal middle ground for two countervailing reasons. One, of course, “is the rising perception of crime and a fear for one’s safety and the safety of their families,” says Ganz. “This is driving folks to find a way to protect themselves.”
At the same time, he contends, “People don’t want to see the level of gun violence that we are currently seeing in America. People are afraid of crime, they are fed up with gun violence, and less-lethal provides a solution that they need.”
Another element Byrna’s customers have in common, adds Ganz, is that they are “people who are going to fight back and not be a victim.”
Less-lethal weapons aren’t likely to put a dent in America’s gun-death problem anytime soon though. Last year, gun violence resulted in nearly 41,000 deaths in the United States, though that was down 9% from 2023. And the total number of firearms sold in the US dwarfs those in the less lethal category, with an estimated 15.3 million guns purchased in 2024, according to The Trace.
There’s also a certain class of gun owners who are unlikely to adopt less-lethal weapons, says Ohio State University professor Randall Roth, author of the book “American Homicide.” “The trend since the early 1970s has been for a smaller and smaller portion of households to buy more and more guns. It’s probably unlikely that those households will change technologies.” The most likely buyers of less-lethal options he sees as “households that own a single firearm for protection.”
Of course, any life that is saved is a win. And the makers of less lethal weapons are explicit that preventing unnecessary deaths is part of their mission. Axon’s founder Rick Smith has stated that its technology will one day “make the bullet obsolete,” adding, “Why are we shooting people with bullets? It’s nuts. When that technology was invented hundreds of years ago, the world looked very different.” And Byrna states on its website that “our product has empowered individuals to protect themselves and their loved ones, without causing irreversible harm.”
Making substantive changes to how Americans engage with guns may be easier than changing human behavior as a way of addressing gun violence, according to David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center. “Fairly small tweaks in design and engineering could save countless human lives,” he has said.
Still, while launchers and Tasers are designed not to kill, no weapon can be called non-lethal. “There’s no such thing as non-lethal. You can kill somebody with a butter knife or a toothpick,” says Aaron Jones, the founder and CEO of International Protective Service, a private security company with offices in seven states.
But there are a number of potential downsides to the weapons. If someone pulls a launcher when police are present, it could be mistaken for a real gun, though both Byrna and JPX offer orange versions of their pistols, which are signals of their less-lethal status. There is also the possibility that the launchers will become reclassified as firearms in the future or that more cities will ban their use.
And not everyone is convinced less lethal alternatives offer true protection. Jones, for one, acknowledges that while projectile launchers are a “great product,” he doesn’t see them as a “be all and end all” solution in a dangerous situation. “When bad guys come at you, they aren’t carrying less lethal,” says Jones. “The average bad guy will not be stunned by a pepper ball device. There always is the possibility it will work, but . . . I carry a firearm.”
But Nance doesn’t see it that way. “Look, we’re living in America and there are lots of guns that are out there,” he says. “But most of the robberies that I investigated as a police officer did not involve a gun. I don’t feel like I’m going to die every time I walk down the street.” But if he’s attacked, he says he wouldn’t hesitate to use his less-lethal launcher. “I’d pop them with this thing in a heartbeat if they needed to get popped. You want the will for them to hurt you to just be stopped.”
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