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.



Saturday, April 5, 2008

"... far preferred to a gun..." If only. Dream on.

2007 British Columbia
496 taser incidents
Robert Dziekanski, killed Oct. 2007
Robert Knipstrom, died Nov. 2007

Would BC police have shot (with a gun) hundreds of people in one year if they hadn't been equipped with the taser? Is this what your argument is based on?

And keep in mind that tasers are far from universally employed by all law enforcement agencies in B.C. It would seem only natural that if they became more widely employed, that the associated outcomes based on the risk (never explicitly numerically defined by Taser) would increase in proportion to their availability.

In other words, virtually every police officer in B.C. has a gun. Relatively few have a taser. In spite of this huge statistical advantage to the taser, their statistics are still looking pretty horrid.

Time to cut-and-paste from my previous summary:

Better than a gun? Don't be stupid. Taser deployments are about two orders of magnitude (~100:1) more frequent than the historical/accepted rate of police shootings (varies by jurisdiction). It’s not even a good lie that tasers replace the gun. Tasers replace talking; to just 24 seconds in the Vancouver Airport incident for example.

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