Mission Statement - De-Spinning the Pro-Taser Propaganda

Yeah right, 'Excited Delirium' my ass...

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The primary purpose of this blog is to provide an outlet for my observations and analysis about tasers, taser "associated" deaths, and the behaviour exhibited by the management, employees and minions of Taser International. In general, everything is linked back to external sources, often via previous posts on the same topic, so that readers can fact-check to their heart's content. This blog was started in late-2007 when Canadians were enraged by the taser death of Robert Dziekanski and four others in a short three month period. The cocky attitude exhibited by the Taser International spokespuppet, and his preposterous proposal that Mr. Dziekanski coincidentally died of "excited delirium" at the time of his taser-death, led me to choose the blog name I did and provides my motivation. I have zero financial ties to this issue.



Thursday, March 27, 2008

Compare and contrast

SAE J1766 'Recommended Practice for Electric and Hybrid Electric Vehicle Battery Systems Crash Integrity Testing': Using IEC 479-1 as a guide, a body current of 200 mA for 10 msec yields the lowest energy level that may produce a shock hazard. (Here a shock hazard is defined to be a body current / time duration that is in the DC-3 zone defined in IEC 479-1.) Assuming this minimum as an upper safety bound. Figure 1 below shows Current Duration versus Voltage at 200 mA for various energy levels. Using the target of 200 mA for less then 0.01 seconds as an upper safety bound, an energy of 0.4 J would satisfy the target values. A factor of two is included yielding the final energy limit of 0.2 J. [LINK]

Taser specification for M26 taser:
Power Output: 50,000 Volt (est.); 26 Watts; 162mA (Irms) and 1.76 Joules per pulse energy (Delivered into load: 0.50 joules)

At this point I would like to point out that 1.76 J (or even 0.5 J) is greater than 0.2 J (or even 0.4 J). No matter how you slice and dice it.

Also, you might wish to consider that Taser's 151 mA RMS for 5 seconds (or 5000 milliseconds) is huge in comparison to 200 mA for just 10 milliseconds.

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