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UN Says Tasers Are a Form of Torture
The use of Tasers "causes acute pain, constituting a form of torture," the UN's Committee Against Torture said. "In certain cases, they can even cause death, as has been shown by reliable studies and recent real-life events." Three men — all in their early 20s — died from after tasering in the United States this week, days after a Polish man died at Vancouver airport after being tasered by Canadian police. There have been 17 deaths in Canada following the use of Tasers since they were approved for use, and 275 deaths in the US. "According to Amnesty International, coroners have listed the Taser jolt as a contributing factor in more than 30 of those deaths."
Bullshit. Because tasers are supposed to be nonlethal they are often abused and used on people who have broken no laws at all. See the recent case of the man who went into a diabetic coma and was subsequently tasered while lying helpless. See the case of the 87 year old woman who was tasered at her rest home for yelling at a police officer from her wheelchair. Neither broke the law, but both were put in danger.
I fail to see how something that is painful and has a non-zero chance of death is automatically torture and should be outlawed. By that measure we should outlaw the average daily commute.Have you ever been tasered? I volunteered to try it. It really hurts, a lot more than a punch to the face even. Have you ever seen the TV show Cops, where they'll hit a guy multiple times while they're laying on the floor. Tasers make muscles contract, and you fall down. That's great, since then they can subdue and cuff a violent offender. Hitting someone more than once, however, is simply torturing someone into compliance. That is torture, unlike a daily commute. Don't believe me, go to a store that sells them and ask for a test shot, a regular 500K stun gun is pretty similar, if tasers are not available to civilians in your state.
For a start, don't call me kid. If you did a tiny (itsy bitsy) bit of research you would see how old I am.
I've actually been beaten by police in a "peaceful protest". Our sit down was broken up by police and someone I didn't know hit one of them. That was all they needed to beat down all of us. I tell you, the only thing I was thinking was that if I could get one of the batons off them I could have an even shot at taking a few of them out.
They don't call it "fight or flight" for nothing. Some people run, some people fight.
In retrospect the whole thing (included the reasons why we were protesting) seems kind of stupid.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Tasers are supposed to be a replacement for guns. Instead is has become a replacement for "Stop!". I have seen videos of people been tased several times for not being able to show a drivers license. The US has become a weapon-loving country. Both the public and the police love guns. Here in Norway police don't even carry guns unless there is a case where the suspect has a gun or other equally dangerous weapon. We can keep it like this because most people don't have access to guns, and if they do it is mostly shotguns or rifles for hunting. We also have the lowest crime rate in the world here. Now don't come complaining about how we are a smaller country, because it doesn't matter (you could enforce it at a state level in the US). The biggest problem in the US now is that people are so used to having weapons, and of course that it is in the constitution (though people seem to have given up that anyway). Back on topic: Tasers would be okay if they are only used in dangerous situations (where people can get killed or seriously injured). But since they are not, it should be regulated if not banned.
Wrestling down a suspect may be easy, but wrestling a suspect and not letting them grab the gun/tazer etc. from your belt might not be as easy.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
Yeah, but it looks a lot worse when you club a 6 year old kid into submission.
I see your informative link, and raise you a pithy comment.
The connotation of tasers with the phrase "non-lethal" needs to be done away with, as well. Calling tasers non-lethal is like calling being hit to the skull with an aluminum baseball bat "non-lethal". Sure, you *might* not die from it -- but there is also a significant chance that you *might*.
Unfortunately the problem is also larger than the utility in use. The problem is that the police can not be trusted and they are all too ready to abuse their power. I remember seeing a documentary on the news (60 Minutes or something like that) about five years ago where they were showing horrible abuses of pepper spray by police.
In the videotaped incident shown, some students were protesting something by locking their arms together and sitting in a circle. Non-violent. Peaceful. They weren't even blocking traffic. Or a sidewalk. Or a doorway. They might have been singing, but I don't recall that for sure. At any rate, they were absolutely not a threat.
So what did the police do? They sprayed pepper spray directly into a foam coffee cup and then took swaps to sop up huge quantities of the pepper spray from the cup. They then forced the eyelids of the protestors open and rubbed the pepper spray DIRECTLY ON THEIR EYES. All experts agreed that such an action is absolutely torture and the pain would be far exceeding any possible pain from just spraying it at someone (where you will have some contact with the eyes, but most of it will be dissipated by the air and distance between you and the target, instead of concentrated in one spot on their eyeball).
Cops get tased in very controlled circumstances (spotters, padded floor with ems on hand) and only for extremely short durations and only once. They then feel like they can tase people who are standing on concrete, in poor health, for as long as they want, and as many times as they want. Just once I'd like to do some real world testing on cops like they do on citizens routinely. If they got pissed at how much I was enjoying it, well I'd just give em another jolt to calm them down. This would continue until they saw my the logic of my superior reasoning.