The fundamental issue...

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"A vastly understated risk of death."


I used these words in a recent post and it struck me that they might just be the best description of the fundamental issue. And this fundamental mistake leads to all that is bad about the taser (beliefs, 'faith', policy, training, overuse, misuse, and abuse).

If everyone was aware that the risk of death might actually be as much as four or five orders of magnitude higher than has been claimed, then perhaps the police wouldn't be trained to (mis-)use the taser to, for example, encourage a DUI suspect to produce their hands for cuffing. [LINK]


We've reached a point where some jurisdictions are suddenly surprised to see their second mysterious taser-associated death. [LINK]

Old rule-of-thumb: "Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action."

So I guess we'll have to wait until Round 3 before the less sensitive observers figure it out.