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Let Talk about Tasers


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Nowadays, the theme of civil liberties seem to be a sub-plot to a James Bond flick rather than "To Kill A Mockingbird." And yet, I think the two are intertwined much more closely that we think. In our apparent acceptance of torture as a legal method of interrogation, the bar of civilized official behavior has been lowered to the point where we are accepting torture in everyday life as if it's nothing. Indeed, we are using it as a form of entertainment. I'm speaking of the ever more common use of the Taser, an electrical device used by police and other authorities to drop its victims to the ground and coerce instant compliance. The videos of various incidents make the rounds on the internet and you can see by the comments at the YouTube site that a large number of Americans find tasering to be a sort of slapstick comedy, the equivalent of someone slipping on a banana peel, with a touch of that authoritarian cruelty that always seems to amuse a certain kind of person. "Don't tase me bro" is a national catch phrase.
Tasers aren't benign however. They kill people. Nobody knows exactly why some people die from being tasered, and they certainly don't know how to tell in advance which ones are at risk. But there have been hundreds of deaths similar to the one below, which nobody can adequately explain:

A Detroit teenager who police say fled a traffic stop Friday died after being subdued with a Taser. He is the second Michigan teen to die following a Taser stun in less than a month. Warren Police say they don't know why the 15-year-old bailed out of a Dodge Stratus he was riding in during the stop on Eight Mile near Schoenherr, leading officers on a half-block chase that ended in an abandoned house on Pelkey in Detroit. The car was stopped for having an expired license plate. In the scuffle, officers shocked the teen one time with a Taser, police said. Shortly after, he became unresponsive and died.
Taser International has successfully defended themselves in lawsuits by attributing the deaths to drug use and if that doesn't work do to the fact that drugs were not present in the victim, they rely on an unrecognized medical condition called "excited delirium", a disease that only afflicts people who die in police custody. Juries apparently find this convincing. Taser has only lost one case.MORE

Date: 2009-08-11 03:42 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] http://users.livejournal.com/_yggdrasil/
Have you seen The Hangover? There's a scene in that movie played for laughs involving tasers, and it really upset me because it reiterates the idea that tasers are funny and just toys, like you're going to play laser tag or something. I doubt the writers would have tried the same scene with a gun.

Date: 2009-08-11 03:51 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] unusualmusic.livejournal.com
I didn't watch teh Hangover, because its in a line of dudebro comedies that are moronic and insulting to every minority that they can catch. I refuse to spend money to put my blood pressure on high. Besides, I prefer wit in my comedies, not slapstick.

Date: 2009-08-11 04:02 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] http://users.livejournal.com/_yggdrasil/
You are seriously not missing anything. Silly me, I went along on a date figuring how bad could it be. Sadly, the taser scene wasn't the lowest part of the film.

I am really jonesing for some smart movies. There is a ton of stuff out there that I don't hear about except through blogs because mainstream Hollywood won't support it. I think I may have mentioned to you how I heard about The Namesake with Kal Penn, three years after it came out. I finally saw it this week and all I can say is DAMN.

Date: 2009-08-11 04:24 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] unusualmusic.livejournal.com
Lemon Tree is in select theatres. Its good.

Date: 2009-08-11 04:29 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] http://users.livejournal.com/_yggdrasil/
Thanks for the rec.

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