Typical unthinking commenter

Halifax, NS - B.C. stun gun report applies here, too [LINK]


The on-line version of the story at the Chronicle Herald website included a comment from 'yorkke' that demanded a response.


'yorkke' commented: I've created a fail-safe, two step plan to remain taser free. 1- Do not commit crimes. 2- If step 1 is violated, do not fight police upon their arrival. I haven't been tasered yet.


When I read that comment, it struck me as odd that someone would think that offering such behaviour-based advice when the subject of the article (Mr. Hyde) was someone that was having a mental health crisis.

It's obvious that 'yorkke' was ignoring the facts, and missing the entire point.

At best, his advice is completely unhelpful. At worst, it is counterproductive and might lead to continued muddled thinking, and thus a vastly increased risk of death for people that are inherently unable to exploit yorkke's useless 'advice'.

And that's typical of ALL pro-taser arguments. They sometimes offer what appears to be a thin layer of common sense, but they do not withstand even a modicum of skeptical scrutiny.

Here's my submitted response:


Excited-Delirium.com responded: yorkke's "plan to remain taser free" shares a characteristic of ALL pro-taser arguments. It only makes sense if you don't think about it too much.

In the Hyde incident, the police were dealing with a man having a mental health crisis. Providing advice to not fight the police is not really a useful suggestion. Mr. Hyde was tasered by police, instantly was in cardiac arrest, but was revived.

In the Dziekanski incident, it is fairly clear that Mr. Dziekanski did not really fight with the police. At most, he was holding a stapler. And yet he was tasered, and tasered, and tasered, and tasered, and tasered, and immediately died of cardiac arrest.

The crux of the taser issue is that tasers are perfectly capable of causing death. But the manufacturer, for obvious reasons, cannot admit this obvious fact. And the manufacturer has had almost complete control of the training.

So the police carry a deadly weapon that they naively believe is 'safe'. Thus they use the taser approximately one-hundred times more often than they've typically used their guns. So it ends up being used on people, such as Mr. Dziekanski, that did not do anything that called for a lethal response.

And that's evil.