Border Patrol Foundation president Ron Colburn was on Fox News earlier to discuss how humanitarian the Trump administration’s use of force has been the past few days. Talking with one of the world’s stupidest people, Steve Doocy, Colburn explained that calling out our government for teargassing children wasn’t the point.
Colburn: To clarify, the type of deterrent being used is OC pepper spray. It’s literally water, pepper, and a small amount of alcohol for evaporation purposes. It’s natural; you could actually put it on your nachos and eat it.
The “OC” in OC pepper spray stands for oleoresin capsicum. The concentration of the capsicum, the thing that gives pepper spray its name and “effectiveness,” differentiates it between what you or I can buy and what law enforcement officials can use.
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The heat of a bell pepper measures 0 on the Scoville Heat Units scale, which is used to measure the "heat" of peppers. A jalapeño pepper scores 2,500 to 5,000 on the same scale.
The heat of pepper spray, however, ranges from 2 million units in commercial pepper sprays, marketed for use in self-defense, to 5.3 million Scoville units for police-issue spray.
This is the same stuff they use for bear repellent.
However, the concentration of capsaicin in bear spray is only 1 to 2 percent. Pepper sprays used in law enforcement reportedly have a capsaicin content of between 10 and 30 percent.
Maybe Mr. Colburn likes to head to the emergency room every time he stuffs nacho chips into his dumb mouth? I suspect he doesn’t, otherwise I’m sure he would have just given everyone a demonstration right there on television.
