The Big Picture (hint: it's not the knife)

I left this comment [LINK] on the It all goes here blog [LINK]. The comment addresses the red herring about the knife in the recent tragic apparently-tasered-to-death incident involving a 17-year old, 5-foot-6-inch, 145 lb youth in Winnipeg that was reportedly wielding a knife.


The issue is NOT the knife.

The issue is that Taser claims that the taser (x26) is safe ("safer than Tylenol"), and quotes studies that claim that the risk of death (cardiac-wise) from a taser hit is in the low end of the parts-per-million range.

Those figures are obviously off by MANY orders of magnitude.

Officers have been brainwashed by Taser's propaganda and they use the tasers as if they are perfectly safe.

Obviously they're not. I think that even many law-and-order nut cases understand that tasers are not 'perfectly safe'; but they haven't followed the larger debate. This level of ignorance is often displayed by the inane 'safer than a gun' argument.

If Taser would just admit that they were wrong and there is actually a modest risk of death from being hit in the chest with an X26 taser, then we could all come to a happy agreement.

Well, except that Taser would then be sued into the next galaxy, and the senior staff and advisers would be personally bankrupted, and some of them might even see the inside of a jail cell.

And so we sit waiting for the most-obvious conclusion to become so un-ignorable that action will have to be taken.

Meanwhile the death count grows.

That's the big picture.


The It all goes here blog wrote an excellent post here: [LINK]