Steve Tuttle, spokespuppet for Taser International, said, "Tasers have unmatched effectiveness with a 94.5 percent field success rate." [LINK]
Sorry Steve, I'm gonna call 'Bull Sh_t!' on that claim. Either you've twisted the meaning of words into meaninglessness, or you've fudged the numbers to achieve a number that looks attractively high.
The problem with making this sort of claim is that, if it is misleading (something that appears highly likely), then you're actually endangering police officers. You're putting out misleading info that will lead them to bad decisions and defective policy.
For decision-making purposes, when the subject is armed with a knife, mixing the obviously more reliable Touch Torture mode into the piss-poor reliability of the hope-and-pray Dual Dart deployment mode is an obvious bald-face attempt to cover up the more-critical failure rate.
And if you've also mixed-in the display-only threatened uses to further bulk-up the number, then that would be utterly evil. Comments?
Here's my counter-claim:
In the Dual Dart deployment mode, there is simply no way on God's Green Earth that the field success rate ever even approaches 95%. No fricken way. Not a chance.
Previous reports have noted figures for the rate of ineffective deployments at 10% to as high as 30%. See this previous post [LINK] for a list helpfully provided by 'Fortress Tactical' of some of the many failure modes.
I'll leave it for police officers to look at Steve's claim and decide for themselves if he's really a true friend of law enforcement.
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