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| Britain |
| UK Taser Use "Could Have Set Off A Boomer" |
| 2005-07-30 |
| The head of London's police has condemned the use of a high-voltage stun gun to subdue a suicide bomb suspect in Birmingham as "an incredible risk", saying it could have set off explosives. Shoot to kill or shoot to stun? The warning came as New York police revealed a 35-year-old man who was shocked with a Taser stun gun while in a police holding cell in Queens, New York, on Thursday died a short time later. In what amounted to a humiliating public dressing down for West Midlands Police, the Metropolitan Police chief, Sir Ian Blair, said his officers could not understand why the stun gun was used on Yasin Hassan Omar in a raid in Birmingham. Newspapers reported Omar screamed in pain as he received a 50,000-volt shock. Speaking on BBC television, Sir Ian was highly critical when asked why the stun gun was used. "I can't imagine how that was used. We use Tasers in London regularly but a Taser sends electric currents into the body of somebody. If there is a bomb on that body, then the bomb can go off." New York police defended the use of the stun gun on a man who had been arrested on drug charges. They say he might have ingested crack cocaine before his arrest and that he had become ill in his cell. When medical personnel were called to help him, he became unruly and combative, the police said, and officers used the gun to subdue him. The stun gun, which is manufactured by Taser International, an Arizona company, incapacitates suspects with an electrified barb that delivers the shock. The gun is marketed as a non-lethal option for law enforcement or personal security, but sales have been falling in recent months amid safety concerns. More than 110 people have died after being shocked by a Taser, although medical examiners have rarely cited the gun as the cause of death. Not very stunning |
| Posted by:Captain America |
| #10 Glenmore---The presentation of your logical alternatives is absolutely Spockian. It should be part of an MSM article describing what a law enforcement officer is up against with a bombing suspect. [/wishful thinking] |
| Posted by: Alaska Paul 2005-07-30 11:58 |
| #9 half, you are a positive delight! :-) |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2005-07-30 10:30 |
| #8 don't know what all the fuss is about. I've been near set off by many a teaser, sometimes one of them big hair gals make me feel like my spine is directly wired to a 240V outlet. |
| Posted by: half 2005-07-30 10:25 |
| #7 So the choices are: 1) Tase the suspect and take some risk of detonating a bomb (if he has one), and some risk of killing him (bad if he's innocent, bad if he's guilty & could have given information.) 2) Shoot the suspect in the head with certainty of killing him (with the associated bad consequences) and STILL some chance of detonating a bomb (dead man trigger, reflex action). 3) Talk to the suspect with a minimal risk of killing him, but a much higher risk of his detonating a possible bomb. Evaluate the situation in 5 milliseconds, and come up with the correct answer. |
| Posted by: Glenmore 2005-07-30 10:22 |
| #6 .com- FWIW, we always maintained the utmost in electrical safety when working with electrical caps during disposal ops. I vividly remember a demonstration during tech school of an electrical cap being set off by static electricity - but in all those cases, there were exposed leads involved. Now, given the level of Jihadi expertise we've seen so far, I would be pretty much expecting exposed leads. On the other hand, given how the Taser works, short of direct contact between the darts and the exposed leads I don't think it would be a risk. Mike |
| Posted by: Mike Kozlowski 2005-07-30 09:56 |
| #5 Taser, schmaser. The only antidote for a boomer is a single (or five-a-pop) .44 to the head while your partner has him pinned to the floor. If he turns out to be a stupid, chilled Brazilian electrician you can show it wasn't 'racial profiling' unlike the hippy-dippy journalist Whitby who called him "asian". |
| Posted by: Harry Callahan 2005-07-30 09:35 |
| #4 The Filth Column has been actively campaigning against Tasers for years. Here in Cincinnati, we had a riot because the activist community constantly lied about police actions; to take away one of their talking points, the police started using tasers. Then, a massively overweight man with a heart condition and high quantities of crack in his system had a heart attack after he was hit with a Taser. The activist community has used that to go after Tasers. They've also sued the police because a beanbag gun bruised someone. Personally, I think we should issue the police automatic shotguns and put 50-cals on their cars. Screw this "less lethal" crap and dial the lethality up to 11. I bet we'd see a lot less crime in a week or so. |
| Posted by: Robert Crawford 2005-07-30 08:07 |
| #3 So they showed 0.0036 amps as 3,600 amps? What's a couple of zeros? They got 'em in the article, just misplaced their location. Simple proofreading error! They do use proofreaders, don't they? |
| Posted by: Bobby 2005-07-30 07:07 |
| #2 Tasers have never been held to be the sole cause of death, ever as far as I can determine, and in the amazingly few instances where they have received some share of the blame (110 total vs ~400 shooting deaths in Wash D.C. each year?) they have defended themselves and prevailed - every time. The MSM has had a woodie for "getting TASER" for awhile, now - and gets soundly bitch-slapped regularly for its bias and moronic inaccuracies. The Press Releases page at TASER demonstrates it rather clearly. USA Today is the latest moron outlet to step on its collect dick. A look will show just how inane the press can be - this one's a hoot, heh. The Medical and Stats info is here - they've been studied to death, pun intended. Hell, most people don't even realize TASER has made three different types of energy weapons: stun weapons (7-14W), EMD weapons (18-26W) and Shaped Pulse™ (18-26W) weapons. As for a TASER setting off explosives, you can find in that last link the actual electrical current delivered - 0.0021 to 0.0036 amperes. I leave it to any bona-fide munitions specialists, but I believe you would actually have to hit and penetrate an electrical blasting cap for there even to be a possibility of explosion. Oooo, TASER's evil! Let's "get" em! Pfeh on all the fools. |
| Posted by: .com 2005-07-30 03:47 |
| #1 Against non-bombers I can see the concern, but I don't see why the worry of setting off explosives by accident isn't a concern. (No, the would-be bomber's life does not concern me, except that you can't necessarily get intel out of a corpse.) |
| Posted by: Edward Yee 2005-07-30 03:09 |