Instapundit points us to a demo of the Taser C2 over at popular mechanics. I have always been a big proponent of pepper spray as the best option for less than lethal force, and I still believe that.
Electrical weapons are replete with problems.  For one, you only get once chance to hit. There’s the issue of the probes being able to get through clothing to the attacker. What do you do once you run out of the 30 second charge? Remember, that was a demo. A real attacker will be hopped up on adrenaline, drugs, or both.
If my friend Jym is reading this, he can tell you the story of the time he volunteered to get nailed by his friend’s stun gun and felt he would have been completely able to fight through it if he had to. The big problem with less than lethals is that any force that’s powerful enough to incapacitate someone to the extent that they are no longer a threat to you is quite likely to kill that person. The root problem is not that technology hasn’t advanced enough, it’s that the human body is surprisingly resilient. Perhaps someday electrical weapons will advance far enough to be able to reliably disable someone for a sufficient period of time to make a safe exit from a deadly encounter possible, but that weapon will probably also be liable enough to kill, that it’ll be treated legally as a deadly weapon.
So I’ll stick to my assertion that Tasers and stun guns are poor substitutes for an effective pepper spray, which are poor substitutes for firearms, when talking about deadly encounters with criminals. Less than lethals have their place, certainly. Definitely in police work. But I wouldn’t rely on them to get myself out of a deadly encounter.
It was actually my ex-girlfriend’s brother’s stun gun. In fairness, he blasted a few of his friends too and they at least fell to the ground, but they were a bunch of scrawny teenagers and I was an early 20s rather stout guy. It hurt like hell and left some blistering burns where it connected, but it wouldn’t have stopped me if I was really intent on harming the person.
Pepper spray may temporarily blind someone and let you run away, if they aren’t too close to avoid and don’t already have hold of you. It certainly won’t disable them. The old joke on the Gulf Coast is that all it will do is make the perp hungry.
A Taser is a lot more effective than a stun gun, because it is subcutaneous and can zap someone for up to 30 seconds at a time. There are drug monsters it won’t knock down, but it will stop their purposeful movement long enough to flee or counterattack.
I live in NC and carry concealed, but I just got the new Taser C2 for my lady, because she lives in CA.