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News: The Supreme Court examined petitions on pellet gun use after students and workers suffered serious injuries during a crowd-control incident in Delhi.
About Pellet Guns
- Pellet guns are 12-bore pump-action shotguns classified as less-lethal kinetic projectile weapons used for crowd control and dispersal.
- Working Mechanism:
- Loading: A cartridge containing hundreds of small pellets is loaded into the pellet gun before firing.
- Firing Process: When the trigger is pulled, the propellant inside the cartridge burns and produces high-pressure gases that push the pellets through the barrel.
- Pellet Dispersion: After leaving the barrel, the pellets spread over a wide area instead of travelling as a single projectile.
- This wider spread makes the exact point of impact of each pellet difficult to control.
- Key Features of Pellet Guns:
- Wide Pellet Spread: A single 12-bore cartridge releases about 500 pellets that spread across a wide area after leaving the barrel.
- Less-Lethal Design: Pellet guns are intended to disperse violent crowds without causing immediate fatalities, but they can cause serious injuries at close range.
- Variable Ammunition: They can fire metal, rubber, or plastic pellets according to operational requirements and force escalation protocols.
Pellet Guns in India
- Manufacturing: Pellet gun ammunition used by security forces in India is associated with production at the Ordnance Factory, Ishapore.
- Protocols: Pellet guns must be used only as a last resort after other non-lethal methods fail.
- Security personnel must follow graded force and, as far as practicable, aim below the waist while using minimal force.
- Operational Deployment: The Union Government introduced pellet guns in 2010 as a less-lethal crowd-control option.
- They were first used by the Jammu and Kashmir Police in Sopore and later adopted by the CRPF and Rapid Action Force (RAF).
- Use in Public Order: Pellet guns have been used during crowd-control operations in Jammu and Kashmir and have also been reported in Manipur in 2023 and the Punjab-Haryana farmers’ protests in 2024.
- Indigenous Alternative: Following concerns over pellet gun injuries, India developed plastic bullets through the DRDO’s Terminal Ballistics Research Laboratory (TBRL), Chandigarh, as a safer alternative to metallic pellets.
