The 'glowing cigarette' taser challenge

My Taser challenges are apparently so difficult and risky that Taser and their fan-boys go all-silent on us when I challenge them.

They've never agreed to turn the trainees and volunteers around to henceforth take all taser training and demo hits directly into the chest (instead of the back) to more clearly demonstrate, in a non-fake manner, their high confidence in the inherent cardiac safety of tasers.


Here is The Taser Challenge for Feb 2009.

Simply answer the very easy question found below:

Background:

If tasers can be used for pain compliance in the 'Touch Torture' (a.k.a. Drive Stun) mode, as they are every single day (even on misbehaving children), then obviously other similar options should also be acceptable.

Let's explore this line of thinking and see where it leads.


Instead of using a taser in Touch Torture mode, why can't the police just use the glowing end of a lit cigarette to cause pain to attempt to induce (force, verb) compliance?


These two options seem to be similar in many respects: Both the taser and a lit cigarette can leave minor burns. Both cause more-than-intense pain, clearly amounting to 'torture'.

The minor differences are all in favour of the cigarette: The cigarette is probably safer from the point of view of 'contributing to' an immediate, untimely and 'purely coincidental' (sic) death. The effects with a hot cigarette are far more predictable and will be self-evident. And cigarettes are certainly much less expensive than tasers.


A taser used in its direct application 'Touch Torture' mode, and the red hot tip of a glowing cigarette, seem to be perfectly equivalent from a functional point of view.


So please explain:

What are the legal, moral, and ethical differences?


Well smarty-pants? Ya got an answer for that?

What's wrong? Cat got your tongue?

Have you gone all-silent on us again?


For those keeping score, the justification for using tasers in Touch Torture mode has just been completely shredded by way of a simple 'reductio ad absurdum' argument. We assume the opposition's argument is true, and then we see where it leads. If the result is absurd, then the original argument has been irrefutably proven to be false. In other words, torture is torture. Even if it's packaged up in a nifty plastic toy-like shape.