Public Safety Minister Van Loan earns his badge

Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan [27 Feb 2009] rejected calls for a moratorium on taser stun guns.

He actually said the original taser lie, "I believe that obviously shooting someone with a gun is going to be far more lethal than the use of a taser and as an alternative I think it's something that should be available to the police." [LINK]


Okay Minister Van Loan - here's yer badge: [LINK]


How can we make this point any more clear?

CBC.ca - December 17, 2007: The RCMP, whose members have fired tasers more than 3,000 times since 2001, said it doesn't keep track of how often firearms are used across the country. [LINK]

3000 taser deployments in seven years (2001-2007) works out to at least 428 per year.

So if, in your imaginary la-la-land world where tasers replace guns, then this imaginary 'RCMP Without Tasers' would have been the biggest band of mass murderers in Canadian history. The RCMP would have single handedly doubled the total murder rate in Canada. Extend this idiot logic to the many other police forces in Canada and it would be a damn war zone.

IT SIMPLY DOES NOT COMPUTE.

Not to mention that CBC found that tasers don't actually reduce those very few police (gun) shootings in any case. [ibid] Your argument is double-dead.

In fact, another study found that police shootings were (in some cases) INCREASED immediately after the officers had been given their so-called Taser Training (brainwashing) as designed by Taser International. Which, by the way, strongly indicates that there is something seriously wrong with the training.


If the Minister of Public Safety is going to make this claim that tasers are somehow useful because they replace guns, then he needs to demonstrate exactly how he proposes to reduce their usage from more than a thousand times a year, to perhaps 12 or 20.

And then he needs to show us a simple chart that tracks the police shooting death rate going down coincident with the introduction of tasers into Canada.


Ball is in your court Mr. Minister. Show us the chart.