David Cornelius Smith, age 28, has no idea who he might be about to meet...

David Cornelius Smith, age 28, was brought down by a Minneapolis police Taser yesterday afternoon at the downtown YMCA after a confrontation with authorities, and for a few moments it appeared he was dead. He lived, but he's in critical condition at Hennepin County Medical Center. ... Smith experienced what police call a "medical emergency" after being shot with the stun gun. ...

[LINK]


Dr. (an actual MD) Jeffrey Ho , Dept. of Emergency Medicine, Hennepin County Medical Center.

You couldn't make this sh_t up, even if you tried.

Dr. Ho is a well-known Taser 'insider'.

It's to the point where it is perfectly reasonable to suspect his many Taser reports and 'studies' (invariably proving yet again that Tasers-R-safe) as perhaps being unreasonably influenced by his way-too-close-to-be-healthy relationship to Taser International and their merry band of idiot minions.

One report that he authored actually documented [LINK] a case where a New and Improved (not really) taser, one supposedly even safer than before (?), actually was found to cause cardiac capture in one of just eight tests (an amazingly clear indication of risk). Cardiac capture is a likely precursor to sometimes-deadly VF, which I supposed might sometimes be accompanied by "difficulty breathing" (sound familiar?). Anyway, his cute little report admitted the existence of this minor problem, but then he brushed it off by claiming that the manufacturer had made some minor adjustment (probably tweaked the knibbling pin on the Johnson rod) to restore the missing safety margin.

Yeah, right... If it doesn't make sense to you, then you've got it nailed.

Here's another one: Dr. Ho's testimony at the Braidwood Inquiry was described by Justice Braidwood as "an insult to the intelligence" [LINK]. That's got to be embarrassing. But that's the sort of thing that can happen when one hangs around with the wrong crowd. One is often judged by the friends (sic) one keeps. Stungun salesmen? Not good. Not good at all. Run away.


PS: All the latest (May 2010) Taser legal warnings [LINK] sort-of leave all the bought and paid-for Tasers-R-safe studies looking just a bit like a waste of perfectly good paper. Must be devastating to have one's sponsor abandon the Corporate myth that you spent so much effort trying to support.


My heart goes out to the family of Mr. Smith. I hope that he recovers. We have more than enough taser "associated" deaths already.