Have you ever been tasered?

Edit 1st response.

Given the gravity of the situation, it doesn’t seem wrong. Better to be be zapped than dead. Poor kid.

Set tasers to stun.

What do you mean @flutherother.

@Dutchess_III It’s a very poor joke. That’s what Captain Kirk says when he wants to incapacitate but not kill, only the Star Trek crew use phasers not tasers.

OK! :)

I just wonder what the very lowest setting would feel like. It might possibly be the least aggressive thing they could have done.

I guess it’s better than shooting her,and saying they were afraid for their safety.

Light shock my ass! Those things are intentionally modulated in ways that screw with your nervous system. They cannot specifically target the voluntary nervous system, so they also can affect the involuntary system… including heart and breathing… which is why there’s been hundreds of fatalities, and many nations putting them in the same category as firearms, if not benning them even for police use.

As someone who is a stickler for facts when it comes to technical matters (like the specs on machinery), I feel I have to point out that not all tasers have adjustable settings. In fact, most do not ! I looked through the Taser™ website, and found only a few new, high-end models (the X2 and X26P… but not the X26 that is commonly used; not all places have the latest/greatest models) that had any output variability, and those were automatic, not user-selectable. And those with no adjustability are calibrated for a larger target than a child; how many kids that age are 150–200 pounds? Please get that “lowest setting” malarky out of your mind unless you can cite a make/model that actually has such a feature. The fact that the kid in that story was in pain far longer than most tased adults, and similar reports from the stories from where they’ve used tasers on teens says a bit more about how big a lie that “lowest setting” crap is.

Okay, now that we have that out of the way, let me remind you that I used to be an electrician, and I did my fair share of work on energized circuits; not all of it mishap-free, but the shocks I got were generally relatively small as most of my work was on 110v circuits… and far smaller than what a Taser puts out. Even then there were times where at least part of my body (usually my right hand, sometimes the whole arm) would be temporarily paralyzed for a while after the electricity stopped. There were a couple times where I got belted to the point of temporary full-body paralysis… and even that was less than a Taser.

Without knowing more about the situation, I can’t say whether the taser was the best option, but I can say that it was, at best, a very risky one. Personally, I wouldn’t use one on anyone under ~100 pounds. Electricity is a dangerous thing, and one that most people don’t understand. They just see tasers as Star Trek style stunners and think idealistic utopian thoughts that don’t quite jibe with reality.

It has always infuriated me that the second a person gets zapped with a taser’s fifty thousand volts the cops continue to yell, “put your hands behind your back!” and I’m thinking, “how can a person follow orders during or after that experience?”
The tasers with no voltage adjustment should be taken somewhere and blown up. They should not be used in the hands of a sadistic, angry, overheated cop.

@Aster Well, there are some like the government of ACLU, Amnesty International, the UN Committee Against Torture, and many others who are not to keen on Tasers. There are a few governments that totally forbid them to anyone, and many others that restrict them solely to special units (regular cops are not allowed to use them), and a ton that forbid them in the hands of civilians.

While I agree with the idea of the taser, the truth is that the ones we have are far from perfect. They cause more problems than they solve in the places that do allow them, and are often used by people with inadequate training in the first place. A poorly-designed device used by untrained people is a recipe for disaster.

And that doesn’t even get into the intentional misuse!

Jerv, that answered my question. Thank you.
But I’d like to point out it would have answered my question with out all the insults. I know nothing about tasers. You do. Thanks for the information.

@Dutchess_III I try to keep my crankiness to a minimum, but don’t always succeed.

Thank you.

I have and I dont think they’re safe. I honestly for a few minutes thought I would die.