Houston - we have a problem.

See Truth...Not Tasers blog [LINK]

#102: February 18, 2005: Joel Dawn Casey, 52, Houston, Texas
#171: January 13, 2006: Daryl Dwayne Kelley, 29, Houston, Texas
#226: October 6, 2006: Herman Carroll, 31, Houston, Texas
#261: April 23, 2007: Unidentified male, Houston, Texas
#359: July 14, 2008: Marion Wilson Jr., 52, Houston, Texas [LINK][LINK][LINK]


Yep. Tasers are perfectly safe. Yep.

Sure... Wanna buy a bridge?


The news reports linked above indicate that tasers have been deployed by Houston police about 1600 times. And we have five deaths (those that we know about) that, on their face, appear to be 'taser-associated'.

Taser and their spokes-puppets will claim that these deaths have nothing to do with the taser.

So, logically, you'd expect to see the same 5/1600 (one in 320) coincidental death rate for other 'perfectly safe' law enforcement activities - like handing out speeding tickets (sans taser deployment). Do the math and you'd see that every police officer on traffic enforcement duties would have several people dying on them (when asked to produce their driver's license at a traffic stop) every month.

Five doesn't seem like a large number, but the ratio 5/1600 is insane for something that is supposedly 'safer than Tylenol'.


But it actually gets worse if you think it through a bit more.

When you consider that drive-stun mode (call it what it is: Push-Pain mode, or perhaps Touch-Torture mode) deployments, normally considered to be safer, vastly outnumber barb- or dart-mode deployments, and that even in dart-deployment mode many times the darts would land in a location on the subject's body that everyone would agree is not as dangerous, then you can see that this 5/1600 ratio is just the tip of the iceberg.

This raw number of 0.3% (=5/1600) might suddenly become something like about 3% or 6% when the denominator washing (10:1, 20:1?) is adjusted out to reveal the true risk of full-on taser hits.

Get it?