Mission Statement - De-Spinning the Pro-Taser Propaganda

Yeah right, 'Excited Delirium' my ass...

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The primary purpose of this blog is to provide an outlet for my observations and analysis about tasers, taser "associated" deaths, and the behaviour exhibited by the management, employees and minions of Taser International. In general, everything is linked back to external sources, often via previous posts on the same topic, so that readers can fact-check to their heart's content. This blog was started in late-2007 when Canadians were enraged by the taser death of Robert Dziekanski and four others in a short three month period. The cocky attitude exhibited by the Taser International spokespuppet, and his preposterous proposal that Mr. Dziekanski coincidentally died of "excited delirium" at the time of his taser-death, led me to choose the blog name I did and provides my motivation. I have zero financial ties to this issue.



Saturday, October 16, 2010

Taser International boldly claims "94.5%" field effectiveness rate

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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