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, October 18, 2008

Old and stale arguments...

There is a serial commenter 'seagulling' (crapping out many ill-informed comments) all over the Truth...Not Tasers blog. Most of the comments are short and sweet and oh-so completely wrong.

For example, this commenter is using the old and stale argument that tasers replace guns.

This is probably the first thing to learn during your Taser-101 education:

The tasers replace guns argument is ancient history and has been completely shredded by the inconvenient statistic that tasers tend to be used roughly one-hundred times as often as the same police historically used their guns. The '100x' is a rough estimate and varies widely.

Even Taser and their various semi-official fan clubs have officially given up on that old 'better than guns' argument. They held a meeting in some back room and passed a motion to start using the new and improved argument that tasers reduce police injuries.

There were several intermediate arguments that we have shredded one-by-one. Review this blog for the entertaining history of the pro-taser arguments.

For the recent tasers reduce police injuries argument, it was initially stated that tasers even reduce injuries for the subject (victim), but then CBC pointed out that tasers inherently (in dart deployment mode) caused injuries that required medical attention. So the most recent edition of 'Why tasers are good (edition 8 or 9?)' drops that part of the claim.

The comments being left by this seagull are simply a clear indication of the level of ignorance on the basics of the issue. The old better than guns argument is quaint and oh-so wrong. Using this argument simple reveals that the seagull has not been paying the slightest attention to the taser issue.

They should review the issue further before further seagulling all over the TNT blog.

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