Skip to main content

SALT is a non-lethal firearm that fires pepper spray capsules instead of bullets

A startup is developing a gun, but it’s unlike any other gun available on the market. Instead of firing with deadly force, the new SALT gun was designed under the premise that a gun doesn’t have to take a life to protect a life. Instead of using bullets, the SALT gun comes armed with pellets containing pepper spray which explode on impact. The dispersal of the pepper spray is designed to incapacitate any attacker, providing home and bodily protection without a deadly outcome.

Developed by Adam Kennedy and his neighbor Andy MacIntosh, the duo desired a way for their wives to protect themselves while traveling for business. Both women repeatedly objected to keeping a gun in their house, so the men came up with the idea for SALT, a non-lethal gun incredibly effective at disabling an intruder.

Unlike traditional guns which make use of gunpowder and provide quite a kick, the SALT uses CO2 cartridges similar to a paintball or airsoft gun. Because the gun possesses minimal blowback, the SALT can be fired easily by anyone, including children, who can handle the gun with minimal chance of major injury from misuse of the gun. It even includes practice rounds containing baby powder, allowing owners to practice firing the gun safely. Because it uses CO2, the SALT doesn’t require official gun regulation by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. It also is not subject to federal gun laws and does not require a background check in order to purchase.

To ensure its gun delivered enough of a punch to incapacitate a target, Salt Supply Company hired several chemists who used to work for PepperBall, a company which produces similar products for military and law enforcement. As a result, SALT’s chemical compounds offer military grade effectiveness. Each round has a four-feet radius that allows the shooter to miss the target while still hitting the intended mark with pepper spray. Once dispersed, the spray is designed to hang in the air which increases the contact with the target. It affects the target within seconds, leaving them incapacitated for up to 30 minutes.

The company already has a factory in Indiana available to produce thousands of SALT guns each month. Initially, Salt Supply Company took to making use of a crowdfunding campaign to raise $75,000 for the insurance necessary to bring the gun to the market, however, the campaign was pulled by Indiegogo. Now, the company continues to look for an alternative crowdfunding site and allows to people to sign-up for an alert when the pre-ordering process commences again.

Kelly Hodgkins
Kelly's been writing online for ten years, working at Gizmodo, TUAW, and BGR among others. Living near the White Mountains of…
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more
Digital Trends’ Top Tech of CES 2023 Awards
Best of CES 2023 Awards Our Top Tech from the Show Feature

Let there be no doubt: CES isn’t just alive in 2023; it’s thriving. Take one glance at the taxi gridlock outside the Las Vegas Convention Center and it’s evident that two quiet COVID years didn’t kill the world’s desire for an overcrowded in-person tech extravaganza -- they just built up a ravenous demand.

From VR to AI, eVTOLs and QD-OLED, the acronyms were flying and fresh technologies populated every corner of the show floor, and even the parking lot. So naturally, we poked, prodded, and tried on everything we could. They weren’t all revolutionary. But they didn’t have to be. We’ve watched enough waves of “game-changing” technologies that never quite arrive to know that sometimes it’s the little tweaks that really count.

Read more
Digital Trends’ Tech For Change CES 2023 Awards
Digital Trends CES 2023 Tech For Change Award Winners Feature

CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most:

Samsung's Relumino Mode
Across the globe, roughly 300 million people suffer from moderate to severe vision loss, and generally speaking, most TVs don’t take that into account. So in an effort to make television more accessible and enjoyable for those millions of people suffering from impaired vision, Samsung is adding a new picture mode to many of its new TVs.
[CES 2023] Relumino Mode: Innovation for every need | Samsung
Relumino Mode, as it’s called, works by adding a bunch of different visual filters to the picture simultaneously. Outlines of people and objects on screen are highlighted, the contrast and brightness of the overall picture are cranked up, and extra sharpness is applied to everything. The resulting video would likely look strange to people with normal vision, but for folks with low vision, it should look clearer and closer to "normal" than it otherwise would.
Excitingly, since Relumino Mode is ultimately just a clever software trick, this technology could theoretically be pushed out via a software update and installed on millions of existing Samsung TVs -- not just new and recently purchased ones.

Read more