gun

Amazon always offers such delightful surprises.

Often a box is lying on my doorstep and my heart leaps because someone has sent me a gift. Only then do I realize that, yet again, I did some late-night online shopping after a small nightcap.

One can imagine, though, that Seth Horvitz of Washington, D.C. must have felt giddy when the flat-screen TV he had bought through a third-party vendor on Amazon arrived at his apartment.

As MyFoxDC dispatches it, Horvitz eagerly opened the box, only to find a Sig Sauer SIG716.

This happens to be, as the Sig Sauer Web site declaims: &… Read more

When an event as senselessly painful as the Aurora shootings occurs, it's inevitable that Twitter -- where feelings are expressed instantly and often without thought -- will reveal humanity's inner self.

So as the sheer horror of the murders was exposed through witness accounts, the tweets flowed in reaction.

Pride of place, surely, went to the Celeb Boutique fashion store. It was so excited that the hashtag #aurora was trending that it couldn't contain its feelings.

"#Aurora is trending, clearly about our Kim K inspired dress ;)" said the tweet, with a link to the Kim … Read more

Rubicon has done it again with Great Big War Game, the sequel to the wildly successful Great Little War Game. In this newest installment of the turn-based strategy game, you are again the bird's-eye-view commander of a comical, yet brutal military.

If you aren't familiar with this particular style of game play, you get one turn to move your units and wage attacks before passing off to your opponent to do the same. The strategy comes in as you attempt to attack your enemy, while still maintaining a safe enough distance to avoid being attacked yourself. As you … Read more

Seth Froom was the victim of a violent robbery last summer. His response was to create the Yellow Jacket, an iPhone case crossed with a Taser. The project is currently up on Ingiegogo for fundraising.

As far as stun guns go, the Yellow Jacket makes sense in that you are likely to have it with you at all times, in a convenient place where you can reach it when you need it.

However, you might be nervous about having 650,000 volts of electricity surging around your phone. Froom says that tests of the prototype have shown that calls stay connected during discharge. … Read more

If patience is not one of your strongest traits, then perhaps a turn-based strategy game is not for you. Otherwise, sit back, and get ready to be consumed for hours by the chesslike pace of this Great Little War Game.

In GLWG, you are the bird's-eye-view commander of a comical yet brutal military force. You get one turn to move your units and wage attacks, then it's your opponent's turn to do the same. The strategy comes in as you attempt to attack your enemy, while still maintaining a safe-enough distance that you avoid being attacked yourself. … Read more

If electricity pioneer Nikola Tesla designed a weapon, it very well might look like Rob Flickenger's Tesla Gun.

The self-described "mad science" enthusiast dreamed up a Tesla rifle after reading the graphic novel "The Five Fists of Science," which features a cover image of a young Tesla wielding several weapons with a built-in Tesla coil.

Flickenger tapped "Seattle's many hackerspaces" to help design and build the Tesla coil cannon over the course of many months. The high-voltage gun balances seriously dangerous science and an array of everyday electrical components capable of firing off 20,000 volts of hair-raising power with a simple click of a trigger. … Read more

N.O.V.A. 3 Near Orbit Vanguard Alliance ($6.99 -- iOS universal) is the third installment of Gameloft's first-person shooter franchise that, many have argued, bears a strong resemblance to Microsoft's Halo. Whether that's true, the game is mostly a gun-shooting good time with all the perks you'd expect in an FPS, but it does have a couple of problems.

With that said, N.O.V.A. is arguably the best sci-fi shooter franchise on iOS, and with the third installment there's plenty more bad guys to blow away in new and interesting … Read more

When a 15-year-old boy was shocked -- to death -- by a Taser stun gun in Michigan in 2009, Amnesty International called for rigorous testing of the weapon, which delivers an initial 50,000-volt shock.

"There have to be ways of restraining an unarmed teenager other than using electro-shock weapons," the organization said in a statement. "Taser guns are not the safe weapons they are portrayed to be. A full investigation into their safety needs to be carried out before more people suffer the consequences of their misuse."

Now, two research papers are weighing in on … Read more

I've been playing Zombie Exodus on my iPad the last few days. The survival horror text game is effective because it leaves so much to my imagination, but that means I also get zombie nightmares. Fun.

I may have a way to dissolve my zombie bad dreams by dispatching some zombies in real life, after a fashion. Zombie Industries offers a line of shooting targets, ranging from entertaining (zombie paper targets) to outright horrifying (bleeding Nazi zombie targets).… Read more