Link 22nd death in Canada caused by a taser in the past 5 years. It's about time that we put our foot down and stop these unnecessary deaths at the hands of our police.
Hey... it's better than having cops use guns on people. Plus... he really really really should have put that knife down.
Well, he would have been alive if they shot him in the foot. Sounds like he was a healthy 17 year old male who couldn't survive the voltage of a taser.
So you'd rather have cops shooting people? Do you realize how minuscule the amount of taser-related deaths is? It'd rather get shocked than shot... I'll tell you that much.
Safer than a gun. A gun can kill the healthiest person in the world! Or would you rather have cops try to subdue criminals with their bare hands? Hell, the kid picked up a knife and was out to do no good to begin with... he was a real criminal... the dangerous kind. There are consequences to a life of crime... some of them include being potentially killed by a taser. Maybe it will serve as an example for other to be criminals... who knows? I personally don't feel sorry for people who steal from other people... There's always Walmart if you're truly desperate.
What happens when they tase someone and kill them in a case of mistaken idenity. The only reason police use tasers is because they are afraid to do their job and possibly break a sweat, Imo.
I agree. More and more here in the states they taze before even doing what they would have done in the past when they were only armed with guns.
in most cases a taser isn't gonna kill. better option than a bullett? yes in the case of shooting a mistaken person with a taser, well the chances are 1) slim that they will be wrong [i mean in the grand scheme of things] 2) most of the time [i wish i had a percentage but im not lookin shit up right now] tasers don't kill HOWEVER my county started using tasers recently and shot a 12-14 yr old for screaming cuss words...WTF?!?! Now that's effed up!
so you would rather take down a knife brandishing theif with your bare hands? sounds like their just might be a pretty high risk of injury doing it that way... kid was stupid....stupid gets you killed.
In this situation there is always other options, how about trying to coax the person out of the situation or what ever happened to pepper spray or what about the classic knock the suspect down with the squad car.
oh yeah, forgot this one, a beanbag round. If it can stun a bear without killing it, I'm sure a less powerful round can do the same.
The problem with these tazers is that they are overused by jack-booted thug police who are trained to use them in just about any circumstance. Here in the US they have been used on people doing nothing wrong and certainly not resisting arrest. They have used them on children and the elderly. Watch this and tell me tazers are being used properly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5g7zlJx9u2E I swear some of you will defend tyrannical government all the way to the forced labor camps. Are the cops justified in using a tazer on somebody with a knife? Probably. But this still shows how dangerous these things are, especially when you consider how often they are wrongly used in circumstances that don't warrant them.
If a person has a medical condition or a pre-existing heart ailment, they most certainly can be very dangerous. They have even proven to be deadly in people with no known health problems. So I don't think you can say they're not dangerous when so many people have been killed from them.
Baseball bats, peanuts, rubber bullets, really sharp sticks, fossilized pre-historic lobster claws, and banana pills are can also easily be dangerous. I can even argue that underwear are potentially dangerous! Point being... cops can still kill people by force-feeding them peanut butter, as an allergic reaction mutilates the victim. The peanut butter wouldn't be the problem here though... it would be the police brutality. Blazing tazers for those deaths is just like blaming the Remington for the deaths of those 14 folks in Texas... when it was obviously the shooter's (and arguably his massive brain tumor's) fault.
Yeah, I'd pretty scared for my life if I got tasered. I take medication every day. And if I could die from a taser, shit. Didn't anyone see that clip that Matt posted about the guy who was pulled over for speeding and got tasered a couple times on the side of the road by a cop?? How many times are the police going to taser people? A person can be tasered repeatedly, several times, for several moments. If you don't do exactly what the police tells you to do and do not co-operate, you get tasered. What if the person doesn't speak English very well like in the case of Robert Dziekanski, hm? He died because he couldn't speak English and someone decided he deserved to be tasered. Not because of stupidity. If police are going to be equipped with a taser with a high voltage, they need to be trained to use it as a lethal weapon instead of counting and relying on it to get people to do what they want by using it repeatedly and without valid cause on people without knowing their medical condition or having patience enough to co-operate with a person. This kid in Winnipeg was 17 and a First Nations' person. Most First Nations' people in the Winnipeg area have weapons like a knife and such on their persons because they hunt for their food. They say that he refused to drop the knife, but that's the police telling their side of the story. We can't corroborate any of it with the kid since he's conveniently dead now. But the police are now also refusing to give an official statement where he was tasered on his body, how many times he was shocked or if he injured himself when he fell. They haven't answered those questions to the media at all. This is a child we're talking about here, and I have a feeling that racism also played a factor in this. There are squalid and ghetto-type living conditions in Winnipeg and the First Nations' people living under the poverty line are at a regional high in Winnipeg. It would be very interesting to know what kind of people are getting tasered; African-Americans, FNs, women, children, ESLs, homeless, prostitutes, whatever. Tasers seem to be a proactive type of social control tool used to keep the under privileged submissive, obedient, and in rare cases indefinitely voiceless.