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.



Sunday, March 23, 2008

Does everyone understand this starting point?

Looking over some of the on-line arguments about tasers, it seems that some people are missing what should be a common sense starting point.

Let me explain it by way of an example:

A 20-something young man gets excited about some disagreement. Police are called. Police arrive. Minutes later the young man is dead. The natural question would be, "What the heck did you do to him?" The officers might reply, "Nothing. He just keeled over and died."

Such a story is improbable. It might happen once in a long while, but it would be asking us to stretch the bounds of incredulity to accept that such an event would be anything but extremely rare; and I mean rare in an absolute sense. I've seen many people in an excited rage, and I've never seen anyone keel over and die from it. Plain and simple, it's exceedingly rare.

Now add a taser deployment to the story.

"Nothing. We just tasered him and he coincidently keeled over and died of natural causes at the same time."

Does adding the taser make the original (unbelievable) story more believable, or less believable?

Like I said, this should be common sense.

And because so many people seem to lack the basics of logical thought, it makes arguments about tasers very tough sledding.

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