Weapons don’t have to be lethal.

Sure, it’s sort of like non-alcoholic beer or lipstick on a pig or bowling with bumpers, but firearms designed not to kill do exist, and many of them come stem from the minds at the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Program — a group of inventors dead-set (pun intended) on coming up with solutions for “better crowd control” or “checkpoint security”.

Their latest creation could make a lot of noise in this sphere, simply because it does make a lot of noise and when you hear it, it might just blow your mind (it’ll feel like it anyway).

It’s called LIPE, an acronym for Laser-Induced Plasma Effect, and it’s so intriguing a technology that the United States military will being tests of it in just a few months.

Basically, it shoots an extremely loud noise like a bullet, in that the deafening sound is only felt/heard by its intended target. It’s like a booming dog whistle that doesn’t affect every pooch in the vicinity of its high-pitched reach — just Fido. Poor Fido.

Here’s more on how the technology works, via Defense One:

Matter comes in four states: solid, liquid, gas, and what’s called plasma, the one least familiar to most people, though it’s actually the most common state of matter in the universe. You can think of it as gas plus. In the plasma state, high doses of energy have pulled electrons from their atomic nuclei, creating ions. A bunch of these hanging out is a state of matter that isn’t a liquid or solid and doesn’t behave exactly like a gas either, but rather has magnetic and electric properties and can take the form of light (think neon lights, or the Sun).

LIPE’s lasers fire extremely short bursts (around a nanosecond, or a billionth of a second) of directed high energy at a target. That target could be on a person, a windshield, or merely a single point in space. The energy, relatively harmless at the LIPE levels, separates electrons and nuclei at the target area to create a blue ball of plasma. Additional pulses of directed laser energy manipulate the ball to make a noise that seems to come from nowhere.

How loud will the sound be? The developers are aiming for 130 dB, which is roughly the how loud a fighter jet gets. It’ll will be able to shoot this concentrated noise from about 100 meters (roughly 110 yards).