Mace vs Pepper Spray
What do you do to protect yourself, if you do not feel secured in the area you live and work and worried about assailants attacking you any time? Besides keeping licensed firearms or knives, there is a very effective way to defend you. Pepper spray is one such way as it incapacitates the attacker momentarily causing a burning sensation in his eyes and skin. There is another similar personal protection tool called mace, and often people confuse between mace and pepper spray thinking of both to be the same. This is incorrect as there are differences that will be highlighted in this article.
Mace and pepper spray cause terrible pain to the assailant, making him immobile for some time. But besides this similarity, there are differences between the two that cannot be overlooked. For one, Mace is a brand name that has been producing irritants in the form of sprays and gels for a long time now, and pepper spray is one of the ingredients in the sprays manufactured by Mace. A type of tear gas is also referred to as Mace. Tear gas, as we all know, employs totally different chemicals from pepper spray though there are formulae of Mace that have pepper spray as one of their ingredients. Thus, when you buy Mace, you could be making use of not just pepper spray, but a host of defensive sprays including tear gas.
Both mace and pepper spray temporarily make a person blind and incapacitate him thus giving the victim of an attack time to escape from the scene of the crime. The major ingredient in pepper spray is called OC, short for Oleoresin Capsicum. This is the same chemical that makes chili peppers hot. But the amount of OC delivered in pepper spray is 15 times more than when one normally eats pepper. One can understand the intensity felt by the attacker when you use the spray on his face and eyes.
Smith and Wesson is the name of the company that first made use of the brand name Mace in 1962. It was promoted as a self defense spray that was aerosol based and used a small amount of tear gas (also called CN gas). However, at present, Mace is being manufactured with OC as the main and active ingredient making it very similar to pepper spray. Today, Mace is a brand name produced by a company called Mace Security International.
Summary
There used to be differences in the formulation between pepper spray and Mace way back in 1962 when Mace contained at least 1% CN gas (commonly known as tear gas) in a solution of butanol, cyclohexene, dipropylene glycol methyl ether, and propylene. But today, Mace brand is being produced by another company than the one that made it in 1962, and it is no more than pepper spray. Both contain OC as the major ingredient and work on a similar principle, temporarily incapacitating the assailant.
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