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March 18, 2010
Swedish police officers injured in laser attack
Published: 13 Dec 09 16:54 CET
Online: http://www.thelocal.se/23826/20091213/
Dictionary tool Double click on a word to get a translation
Two Swedish police officers received eye injuries after being shot by a green laser in Trelleborg in southern Sweden late Saturday night.
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“Two officers were taken to hospital in an ambulance,” Skåne police spokesperson Lennart Honemark told the TT news agency.
“They’ve been treated and allowed to return home, but it will be awhile before we will know if their eyes were permanently damaged.
Another police car was show by the laser, but no officers were injured.
According to the Svenska Dagbladet (SvD), there have been more than 80 reported laser attacks against police in Sweden in the last year.
Officers have sustained injuries to their eyes, but so far none of the injuries has resulted in permanent damage.
In addition to the attacks on police officers, a number of other civilians have also been injured after being shot with laser pointers.
The offending laser pointers are thought to be of a variety used for lectures and are often no larger than a pen or a pocket flashlight.
Since February 1st of this year, Sweden has required people wishing to use laser pointers stronger than 5 milliwatts in public places to obtain a permit from the Swedish Radiation Safety Authority (Strålsäkerhetsmyndigheten).
However, it’s still possible to obtain the products, which are sold freely over the internet.
What do you think? Leave your comment below.
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Lasers don't cause temporary black spots. They burn the retina and cause permanent blindness.
I hope the people who did this get what they deserve.
The one i bought was 5mw, but its easy to "tune" it higher by just following some simple internet tutorials... scary considering what "just" 5mw can do to the human eye.
Banning can work, if it is difficult to elsewhere, but when you might just have to cross a border a ban is just useless. On paper the government have done a good job and banned something "dangerous", but how well did that ban work out?
The best thing is to educate people about it, but later ban if no one is willing to be educated of course.
If we were to ban anything that might be potentially dangerous, it would be easier to just make a short list of things that would not be banned.
In some countries it is illegal to access wireless routers to access the internet, even if the router is deliberately been made open to the public. Is that a society you want to live in?
Punish those who do wrong. Punishing everyone never works out in the end.
I too hope they get what they deserve...
but lasers can cause temporary vision issues (no permanent retinal damage). I am talking from my own experience in a research environment. I knew two others that were not as lucky. They received permanent partial vision loss (ie permanent black spots).
Sweden has far too many kilometers of border for that to have any chance of enforcement anyway.
Why should the actions of one person affect the freedoms of hundreds of others?