This article on a new deafening but non-lethal acoustic weapon has been making the rounds on the progressive/left/anti-war news sites over the last month.

The human rights and legal issues surrounding the secretive deployment of such a weapon in Iraq aside, the reality of losing one of your primary senses really amounts to a form of brain damage (of your auditory cortex). Unlike other non-lethal weapons like rubber bullets, flash-bang grenades and electromuscular disruptive devices (tasers), where recovering from the damage is possible, permanently crippling a primary sensory function en masse is an extremely serious offense. Accordingly, in 1995 when there was an international ban of the development of non-lethal lasers that permanently blind. These so called acoustic weapons should be treated no differently.

While some might argue that deafness is “better” than death, (and it is in some vague, abstract academic kind-of-way), inflicting this kind of sensory damage on a population is in fact killing them. Sure it doesn't happen right away, and without any possibility of healing or any chance at reparations (yeah right!) the net effect is that the death is all that much slower and inhumane.