This video is a frightening education!

.338 Lapua (or better) should be the immediate response to any person utilizing this weapon.

Make the risk/reward consequence catastrophic... This crap will stop!!

These videos are both informative and sobering. There's a whole different world out there that we're unaware of and ill prepared for. The young man shown in the video seemed good natured and stable but is everyone......??

This sort of thing is one of the arguments I use against gun control. In the 1950's, we had switcblades as the "devil". Today, it's lasers and beyond.

Weaponry and the technology they're based on are becoming so far beyond our ability to understand, let alone control. There is so much power in the hands of the average person - and that's going to become more so.

One day, we'll look upon our current problems as the good old days.

V.

Back from my weekend getaway with no internet...

The video is a very informative one and he spoke about what I said before about OD ratings (Optical Density). Something to consider is that he's shining a laser right at a power meter from less than a foot away. At that distance the beam is still very concentrated on a very small spot on the glasses. A laser beam can range from 0.5mm to 3mm wide that close to the output of the laser head. The quality of the laser determines how collimated the beam is.

Collimation is when the beam is the same diameter after a long distance away from the laser head. If the beam is converging, it will eventually come to a focus point or "waist" before beginning to diverge and get bigger. If the beam comes out of the head converging, the waist can be six inches or six meters from the laser head (pulling that number out of thin air). After that point it begins to diverge and get bigger the farther away it is until it's so big, it can't be seen and is too scattered.

I talked to an OSP trooper on Friday and asked him how far the miscreants were from police, and he indicated perhaps 20 yards. To get an accurate picture of how much protection laser glasses will provide, we'd have to know the beam size at certain distances.

At my job, depending on the wavelength, we can focus a beam down to about 12 microns or so with the UV lasers (355nm) and maybe 30 to 50 microns with the IR CO2 lasers that operate in the 9000 nm range. Depending on the watts, a focused beam will punch through paper-thin chrome on glass with as little as 200mW, or 0.005" sheets of copper at 10W. The point I'm making is that laser glasses at 20 yards from a hand held laser should hold up pretty well if the glasses are made for that wavelength. The power will be dispersed over 1/2" (13mm-ish) or more, depending on the quality of the laser.

The kid in the video was hitting laser glasses with 7W of power focused on a spot that was maybe 1mm to 3mm wide at point blank range and setting the glasses on fire or melting them. The same 7W beam at 20 yards may be 10mm to 30mm wide and all the power is disbursed over a larger area. 7W focused on a 1mm spot will have different effects than 5W focused on a 10mm or 15mm spot.

The glasses will be able to block the light as there isn't a hole burnt in them. 5W at 20 yards will produce some heat, but I don't believe enough to melt or crack laser glasses unless it was sustained at that same point for a very long time.

UV scatter on the eyes hurts. It's like getting sand in your eyes. Green and IR, not as bad, but psychologically, green gets your attention much quicker.

On a side note...
I've been burnt plenty of times by lasers and I'll take a green or IR burn over a UV burn to the skin any day. The larger wavelengths will cause sharp pain, but the UV burns penetrate deep into the skin very quickly and the pain lingers. I once caught an 18W UV laser beam that shattered my ceramic beam block and allowed the beam to hit the back of my hand, which was in the beam path. It was like getting stung by a wasp. My skin instantly bubbled up and blistered. It eventually popped and I had a small crater (2mm wide) at the base of my thumb that didn't fill in for about 2 years.

On the other hand, we had a guy swipe his hand through a 300W CO2 laser beam and he didn't know he was hit until he started smelling burnt flesh and he looked at his hand. The beam turned the surface layer of his skin to ash and he just blew on it and it flaked away. It didn't penetrate deep at all. Took a week for the smell to go away.

Tony.

Some years ago when we were facing an increasing number of laser incidents in the cockpit, especially in Afghanistan (where we had crew disabled or blinded by lasers), I did some testing and research with then-available laser glasses for cockpit use.

The problems with the existing protective gear at the time were several-fold. They were limited in their protection to certain wavelengths, negating the ability to have protection against several types (blue lasers were becoming a problem at the time, with both red and green prevalent), and the limited light transmission made their use questionable under low-light conditions. I can't say a lot about those trials and the results, other than the available products at the time were not adopted for our use.

I have a pile of laser safety goggles next to my desk.

Give me a day or so. I literally have two dozen pairs next to my desk.