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 13, 2008

Swine of all sorts - including the 2-legged variety

Millionaire / Taser-Director Kroll basically states that swine models are a poor replacement for human studies. This is in the context of pigs (even large pigs) having serious cardiac reactions to X26 taser shocks (ventricle fibrillation, even death). Reproducible issues (several studies). There seems to be no direct arument from Kroll/Taser on this point. So they've retreating to the position that pigs are "easy to fibrillate" (flying in the face of measures taken by independent researchers to compensate for the known deltas).

Taser Chair Smith claimed that 'the taser' (sic) has a 15-to-1 safety margin. M26 model? X26 model?

So... combine these two positions:

Are pigs significantly (15-to-1) easier to fibrillate than humans? Or more like 2-to-1, or maybe 3 to-1 easier?

The only way these two Taser positions would make any sense would be if swine were at least something like twenty times easier to fibrillate (significantly more than the supposed human safety margin of 15-to-1). That I doubt very much.

So, Safety Margin? Hello?

Oh HELLO? SAFETY MARGIN?

Come out come out wherever you are!

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