What Does NMI (or Neuromuscular Incapacitation) Mean For My TASER Energy Device?
My name is Dave Wright and I am the Chief Instructor of TASER training.
What Does NMI Stand For?
Let's talk about NMI. What is neuromuscular incapacitation? First and foremost, the central nervous system is how the body and the brain communicate with one another.
How Does it Affect the Central Nervous System?
NMI is incapacitating the entire central nervous system with two basic branches, with the sensory nerves and the motor nerves.
Sensory nerves send messages from our body to the brain.
Motor nerves send the message back from our brain to the body.
I'll give you an example. I touch something hot. My hand communicates to my body and says, “brain, this is hot.” The brain sends a message back saying, “hand, remove yourself from the hot object.” That, in a nutshell, is how the central nervous system works.
Pain Compliance
What's pain compliance? We hear about pain compliance a lot. When we look at the StrikeLight 2, we use it in the contact motion. We drive it into the body. We can use other TASER devices in the same manner. That is a means of utilizing pain compliance.
That's great, but it has limitations. When I use pain compliance, I affect the sensory nerves, but not the entire central nervous system.
On the opposite side of the coin, when I use a TASER device with propelled wires and probes going downrange, and I get the probes into the body with a nice probe spread, we not only affect the sensory nerves, but we affect the motor nerves, and we create what is called neuromuscular incapacitation (or NMI). And for example, with the TASER Pulse 2, we have 30 seconds of neuromuscular incapacitation, which gives me a viable escape option to seek safety in the event that I need to use this device as a means of self-defense.
NMI is preferred over pain compliance.
