Taser's fundamental error

IMPORTANT UPDATE to this post: The views and statements in this particular post are a result of, and based on, the other 600+ posts to be found on this blog previous to this particular post. In other words, this post is not self-contained. That was never the intention. I'm sorry that I failed to make this point sufficiently clear, but it is extremely difficult to foresee every possible misinterpretation.

It is highly recommend that those interested in the subject of tasers avail themselves of all the information contained in this blog. Almost everything is backed-up with pointers to sources and applicable references. If you're completely new to the subject, you may have to read the entire blog to catch-up with all the taser news that has happened over the last year or so. For those entering the subject with favorable assumptions about tasers, you'd better sit down.


Taser, and their in-house brain trust, believe that there is a particular value of applied current that will accomplish the following two goals: 1) reliably lock-up the subject's muscles, and at the same time, 2) have essentially zero risk of any significant impact on the subject's organs.

It is my view that there is no such value of applied current that can achieve both goals (when applied over a wide population). I believe that once you have achieved reliable muscle lock-up, then you've chosen a value that brings with it moderate risk of serious impacts to internal organs and systems (for some subjects). In my view, the oft-quoted safety factor of 15-to-1 is an illusion and fails to account for overlap in the bell curves and other variables. In my view, Taser has vastly underestimated the risk, by several orders of magnitude.

The result is that Taser must resort to an increasingly-bizarre series of explanations to explain away the taser-associated deaths. According to them, not one of the many hundreds of taser-associated deaths was caused by the taser. Not one.

On the other hand, in my view, many of those tragic deaths would be a perfectly natural and expected outcome of implementing the rather stupid concept of using electricity to "safely" stop a person. It really is just that simple.

Look up 'Occam's Razor'. [LINK]