Before reading this article, please click on the web link below. Listen to the screams of the young woman who was tasered by 2, burly, fully armed Boynton Beach, Florida, police officers, during a routine traffic stop. Her "crime?" She had refused to get out of her vehicle immediately, when so ordered by the officers. She can be heard clearly, in the video, attempting to finish informing a contact on her cell phone, her mother, as to her exact location and circumstances. That is an important point in this incident for a number of reasons. Rather than to allow her the few seconds, or perhaps a minute or two at most, to calm down and finish her call, the officers tasered her. Not once, twice.
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/content/news/video/taser_video3a.html
How many seconds of her screams were you able to endure before having to stop the video or turn off the sound? 5 seconds? 10? 30? The entire video? The answer to that will probably be shortest for those who have experienced the greatest amounts of physical pain and longest for those who have never known dire pain up close, ugly and personal, from the inside out. But, think about this: The officers who inflicted that brutal torture upon her not only felt no empathy for the indisputable agony they'd caused, they tasered her a second time for the "offence" of being unable to place her hands behind her back. Yet the officers had to have known that their first shot had rendered her completely unable to initiate or control any movements of her body.
It is also necessary, in an effort to clarify the issues in this incident, to provide some background on the circumstances in which Ms. Goodwin found herself when she was pulled over for a traffic violation. Another serious problem with tasers is the detrimental effects they seem to have on the abilities of the law enforcement personnel wielding them to use sound judgment as to when, and when not, to use a potentially lethal weapon against a civilian who is not in the act of committing a violent crime and not attempting to flee. The background in Ms. Goodwin's case provides a striking example of the apparent loss of reason and judgment present in taser armed law enforcement officers.
A growing number of women in the U.S., including several Florida residents, have been raped by one or 2 men posing as cops making routine traffic stops. This common criminal MO has been used by rapists in every area of the country, and several women were killed in the midwest, along Interstates 80 and 90, during the 1990s. The fact that rapes and rape-murders by police, and/or police impostors, have been happening since the 1970s should be common knowledge to every active duty law enforcement officer in this country. Women's rape support groups and self defense organisations, including those affiliated with the national YWCA, have long recommended that women driving alone, when ordered to pull over by a patrol car should continue to drive slowly, safely and carefully until reaching a police station, firehouse, ambulance company or other municipal office, rather than stopping at once.
In addition, women who have cell phones are advised to contact a friend or family member and report their exact location and circumstances to someone they can trust to follow up on the call. They are advised do so before either opening the window or getting out of the vehicle. These guidelines have been sent to police departments around the country, and should be common knowledge to all police officers by now. Ms. Goodwin was following exactly the recommended personal safety guidelines for any woman driving alone when she called to report her situation to her mother.
But the Boynton Beach Police Department is evidently unaware of even that much factual information regarding the rights and needs of the public they are allegedly sworn to "protect and serve." Not coincidentally, among traffic stop taser incidents thus far reported, all but one victim was a woman, one of whom was 8 months pregnant. Never before have police in routine traffic stops even considered using weapons against a pregnant woman, or women in general, nor against children, elderly and disabled people, but such incidents are now becoming routine for law enforcement and security personnel armed with tasers.
Other police tasering victims in the past months include a 75 year old woman who was a confused visitor in a nursing home, a 13 year old girl who was yelling at her mother, an epileptic man in need of medication, and an unruly 6 year old child in a school principal's office, tasered to supposedly "keep him from hurting himself" with a piece of broken glass he was wielding. There is obviously some essential element of the plain old common sense police officers once used in their jobs that is being forgotten as soon as a taser is in hand. They fail to realize that the taser is, in fact, a weapon, and that tasers can kill. This is largely due to the product "information" they have received about tasers from the manufacturer. The only taser product information available, as yet, comes from Taser International, Inc., and without benefit of any actual scientific and medical studies of tasers' actions and effects having ever been done.
A basic psychological element tasers seem to cancel is the self restraint of police officers using them. A fundamental and important question comes to mind here: What would they have done, in all of these situations, had they NOT had tasers? Tasers are being used indiscriminately, with alarming and growing frequency, in situations where there is no justification for the use of a weapon, and where there would have been a far less violent, or even lethal outcome, had no taser been available. The last point holds especially true for all of the past year's 103 taser related deaths. Had the officers involved not had tasers, it is most likely that all of those victims would still be alive.
It also seems that tasers remove all empathy from the officers who use them. It may be that most officers have been so thoroughly convinced of the taser's benign nature they simply fail to understand that it can harm anyone, not even a small child. It is nearly certain that they do not consider it a weapon of last or next to the last resort, but of first and only choice in conflicts with even minimally recalcitrant members of the public. They do not hesitate to use tasers immediately and repeatedly. This is insanity. It would be immediately recognized as insane behaviour if the weapon being used so frequently, arbitrarily and dangerously by police officers were a cudgel or a whip, for example. But there is a peculiar and lethal blind spot in the public's attention and consciousness regarding tasers. Yet tasers are frightening technological devices that deliver a massive dose of artificial lightning to the victim's body and brain.
In the video of Ms. Goodwin's tasering, the utter loss of reason by the police officers is striking. They DO know that the taser's effect is to make all voluntary movement and muscle control impossible. That is why and how it "stuns" someone. That information, including witnessing the effect, even shooting each other with their tasers and experiencing it for themselves, is an integral part of their training in the use of these weapons. Yet, they tasered this woman a second time for her "disobedience" in "refusing" to put her hands behind her back, when she was, in fact, absolutely incapacitated from doing that by the very taser blast they'd just given her. That is completely irrational behaviour. Their logical, reasoning minds had ceased to function at all. They had ceased to be human at that point, and were then acting/reacting on the purely "lizard brain" level. They had reverted to instinctual, predatory, hunting pack mentation and behaviour.
WHAT WOULD THESE POLICE OFFICERS HAVE DONE IF THEY HAD NOT BEEN ARMED WITH TASERS? Whatever it was, that is what and as they should have done, and never even thought to do, not only in Ms. Goodwin's case, but in all of the previously cited incidents of unjustifiable taser use against innocent civilians. Somehow, once armed with a taser, a police officer becomes worse than trigger happy. It becomes a literal "shoot first and ask questions," or even think at all, "later" reflex for them to use these weapons. The only problem being that there were 103 dead, innocent victims of tasers in the past year who would be alive here and now if the police officers who shot them had not been armed with tasers.
It is clear that the officer who fired the first time, as displayed in his gestures, voice and bearing, was angered by Ms. Goodwin's defiance of his order to leave her car at once. What really triggered the first tasering was his affronted ego. Next, it was her defenseless agony both of the officers reacted to in the second attack upon her. If you will consider the way a cat goes after a crippled and cornered mouse, then compare that classic predatory behavior with the actions of these two Boynton Beach cops, you will come to the realization that they were predators hotly pursuing and enjoying the "killing" of their chosen prey. While that dynamic may or may not be present in the tasering of other victims by police, it is the dynamic in this one incident, with these two police officers.
Whatever the full psychological underpinnings of the ease with which the police in this country and elsewhere are using tasers, there is an element of "gotcha" that has entered the equation. It is probably subconscious, and was previously kept in check by an awareness that all of the weapons available to them, i.e. nightstick, gun, mace, could and would cause injuries to their victims. Police officers, prior to being armed with tasers, knew that they themselves would be held accountable if they used any of their weapons in a trivial matter and caused injury to an innocent civilian. That was the check on their behaviour, the previous restraint which is now obviously missing. With the threat of their own personal accountability and probable punishment removed, the officers strike out at will, on a whim and whenever it suits them. And, thus far, no police department or court has told them to stop it, or yet held a single officer accountable for a taser fatality, let alone for the unnecessary use of a taser.
The blame for the rising numbers of taser deaths, and the rising frequency of taser use, lies squarely in two camps, both of which are profiting handsomely, in different ways, from the cancerous spread of the use of tasers. The owners of the company that makes the devices are getting filthy rich, and the police who use them are literally getting a free license to torture and potentially kill anyone who even dares to rub them the wrong way, let alone to "argue" with them or refuse to obey them immediately and in every slightest regard. Big payoffs indeed, for both sides.
Police armed with tasers think that they've been given the perfect means to "get" everyone who defies their authority even slightly, by using a weapon that will not result in harm to their targets. That is how the taser has been and is being billed, as a totally harmless weapon cops can use freely, anywhere, anytime, on anyone, with no adverse or lasting consequences to the victims beyond the temporary, all encompassing pain and paralysis it inflicts.
However, in the horrendous "torture guidelines" that brought us Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and worse, one of the criteria cited, in an absurdly narrow definition of what does constitute torture, is "producing pain sufficient to cause bodily injury, organ failure or death." Thus, it has clearly been long known and well documented that pain alone, if severe enough, can and will kill. Is it the agony inflicted by tasers, an essential ingredient in their much touted "stopping power," that is randomly killing people?
The amount of pain necessary to reduce any human being to the horrified screams of Ms. Goodwin, after the first taser blast, is at least equal to that of having several major bones broken, badly, all at once. Only those who have experienced that amount of pain for themselves will be able to fully appreciate the horror of that recording. An exponentially worse level of pain is required to reduce a human being to the hopeless, uncontrollable type and cadence of moaning semi-screams being heard after she was hit with the second taser jolt. By the time any human being has been reduced to the second stage, he or she would gladly die to escape the agony. Again, only those who have experienced it themselves will know the truth of it. Those who have not had the intimate experience of pain severe enough to cause such responses should fervently hope that they never will.
The sounds you heard in that video are not those of a hysterical woman over- reacting to a fairly mild pain. They are the sounds of a human being who has just been psychologically and emotionally destroyed by a torture so profoundly shattering that she will never be the same again. She will have PTSD from it, and suffer damages in mind and spirit for the rest of her life. It will either make her or break her, in terms of her personal development over all the rest of the years of her life. Either way, SHE WILL NEVER BE THE SAME AGAIN. Neither will any victim of a taser.
She has lost the last vestiges of her innocence: Her belief that there is any safety for her in this world; her innate certainty that bad things won't happen to her, personally; her naiveté in not being aware of her own vulnerability to every possible ill, terror and suffering that can afflict a human being; her basic sense of worth, of being deserving anything good; her dignity and sense of personal privacy. All those things and more were annihilated with the taser's total and violent destruction of her body and brain's neuro-synaptic impulses and connections. The taser inflicts a lifetime's worth of punishment upon its victims in a very few minutes. Make no mistake of that. The pain tasers inflict is, all alone, "sufficient to cause bodily injury, organ failure or death."
There is a solid and growing body of medical evidence to support the contention that the electrical shock delivered by a taser can and does kill, based upon the overall health, age, sex, race, galvanic skin conduction status and serum electrolyte balance of the victims. There were 103 taser deaths in the U.S and Canada in the past year, and the one, most obvious cause of death failing to be considered by coroners is the systemic neurological shock and trauma to the brain that can result in death from pain alone, if the pain is severe enough. It is directly because of the advertising and promotional materials distributed by the manufacturer of tasers that this very real and probable cause of death for taser victims has been overlooked, or even deliberately denied and hidden.
Those pamphlets and promotional videos say, over and over, as a litany - begging the remark that the makers of tasers "doth protest overly much" - that the electrical shock of a taser does not produce severe enough pain to cause harm. That is a blatant lie. Any injury that inflicts so much pain as to render an adult unable to control their own muscles and causes the bladder to void from the stress, induces the most extreme degree of pain possible. The taser incapacitates the target through the induction of systemic neurological shock and neurological pain.
It shorts out the body's electro-cerebral impulses with a 50,000 volt blast of artificial lightning. That is the very definition of a serious electrical injury to the nerves and brain. Anyone who received the same amount and kind of electric shock from any source other than a taser would be taken to a hospital at once, treated for acute electrical shock and placed under observation, at the very least, for the next 24 to 72 hours. Guarding a patient against sudden cardiac arrest and/or sudden respiratory arrest after he or she has had a major electrical shock, or been hit by lightning, is necessary for a minimum of 24 hours and the danger is not entirely past for 3 to 5 days.
Everyone knows that electric shocks are dangerous. A household electrical socket, in the US and Canada, will only deliver 110 volts, but there are very few people who would consider getting seriously shocked with even household current to be "harmless." Electrical shocks most often injure the autonomic nervous system, that part of the brain and nervous system that controls involuntary functions such as breathing, respiration, temperature, pulse and blood pressure, all of which can fluctuate wildly, even fatally out of control, without warning, for many hours after a major electrical shock.
The primary criteria used to determine whether any kind of electrical shock, other than from a taser, was strong enough to recommend that a person be placed under observation for a day or more is whether the shock was strong enough for the victim to have been knocked unconscious, to have been temporarily paralysed, or to have caused the patient severe pain accompanied, even briefly, by uncontrollable muscle spasms and twitching.
These are exactly the results of a taser's shock, and the means by which it "stops" the target. Tasers have been aggressively, and very profitably marketed, by their inventor and manufacturer, Tom Smith, founder and CEO of Taser International, Inc., Scottsdale, Arizona, as a risk free, non-lethal restraint device. There are at least 129 taser related deaths since the introduction of tasers in 2001, 103 of them in the past year alone. Mr. Smith is either not telling the whole truth about the danger of tasers or else, as is entirely possible, he believes his own hype about their safety and is in denial of their dangerously lethal reality.
Clearly, there is something directly related to the nature of the taser itself that is the cause of these deaths, and no research to find out exactly what a taser does to the human body has ever been done. NONE. Not one single study.
In strictly medical terms, it is never "safe" or "risk free" to provide the human brain/body system with 50,000 volts electrical shock. That is a massive shock, whether such a huge amount of voltage is delivered at 0.01 amp, 1 amp or 50 amps. The voltage alone is sufficient to potentially cause brain and neurological damage, cardiac arrhythmia or arrest, temporary respiratory paralysis and even death. And, exactly as with any other source of serious electrical shock, the deeper neurological or cerebral injuries won't necessarily appear in the first few minutes after the shock was inflicted.
The taser's mechanism of action in the human body is akin to that of being hit by natural lightning. It electrically creates a systemic cerebral, neuroleptic and synaptic shock. Those who display its "harmlessness" by voluntarily allowing themselves to be shocked are playing a deadly game of Russian Roulette. In fact, since the effects may be cumulative over time, or delayed several years in their onset, not uncommon with neurological damages of all kinds, the lasting, lifelong neurological and/or cognitive impairments will come a few years down the road. Those who have volunteered for any previous taser jolts would be well advised to stop doing so at once. The lives they save may be their own.
Someone who has been shot with a taser a dozen times and lived to tell the macho tale may just happen to have a slight potassium deficiency the next time, perhaps from sweating heavily on a hot day, or from hard exercise. Even worse, he might still be covered with sweat. If so, then the next voluntary taser shot will very probably kill him. That is just how unpredictable and random the factors determining who will live and who will die from any given use of a taser really are.
Galvanic skin conduction is vastly increased by the presence of sweat on the skin: The heavier the sweat, the greater the electrical conductivity of the skin. A person whose body is entirely soaked with sweat will offer zero resistance to the taser's voltage, from head to toe, and, no matter where the taser's barbs strike, the voltage will be freely, uniformly distributed over every inch of the body that is covered by the sweat.
Sweat is loaded with electrolytes, such as potassium, sodium and calcium, all of which are electro-conductive metals. It is even more highly conductive of electricity than water. Sweating will render a polygraph test unreadable. Sweat filled pores and their fully active sweat glands may also provide a direct conduit for the conduction of a taser's voltage into the interior of the body and directly into the root nerves, lymphatic and endocrine systems thereby.
When a body covered with sweat is shocked by a taser, or other electrical source, the actions of the sweat in enhancing the punch delivered by the voltage is directly analogous to the function of the wet sponge placed under the helmet of a condemned person in the electric chair to assure maximum delivery of electricity into the brain. The sweat conducts the taser's 50,000 volts directly and deeply into the entire body, including the sweat soaked head, thus the brain. The result of tasering a sweating person quite possibly is death by electrocution, plain, simple and ugly.
The actions of a taser's voltage within the human body, the kind and quantity of the pain it creates and the way in which it produces that pain, are the real causes of death. The factors determining a taser victim's survival are: a) How much of that voltage gets delivered; b) How deeply it is conducted into the body; c) Where it goes in the body; and d) How much voltage a specific individual can withstand, at the level of the brain and neuro-synaptic pathways in the central and peripheral nervous systems, at a given moment, on any given day. There is simply no way to know who will die except by who does. Any new medication with the unpredictable kill rate already demonstrated by tasers would have been banned by now. The taser is a highly dangerous weapon that has been falsely labeled and sold to law enforcement and the public as "safe."
This is NOT the harmless stun gun of the Star Trek "phaser" variety that it is purported to be. It could kill any victim, any and every time it is used. For the American public now facing taser armed cops, with all of the psychological restraints against using a weapon removed by the taser's presence, every traffic stop or other law enforcement confrontation has become a "crap shoot" and a potential immediate sentence of death by electrocution, cardiac arrest, respiratory arrest or systemic shock. Whenever anyone fires the leads of a taser into someone's flesh there is no possible way to measure all of the variables involved so as to know whether that individual is going to die. It all depends on a wide number of factors, unique to each and every individual and variable from one hour to the next within each person's body. There is simply NO means for any police officer, or anyone firing or facing a taser, to be sure that the person being shot will not die.
The taser has been aggressively promoted as a "safe, harmless, nonviolent restraint and personal defense device." I find that to be a somewhat misleading representation for any weapon that leaves its victims screaming in sudden and potentially lethal agony. The only question remaining is not whether tasers are deadly weapons, but how many innocent people will have to be killed by tasers before action is taken to prohibit their indiscriminate use, if not by banning them entirely, at the very least by putting them under the same use guidelines and ownership restraints, and in the same category of lethality, as handguns.
Already, in an effort to gag the press over printing the facts about taser deaths, Taser International is suing Gannet Publishing, the owners of USA Today, for libel over their reporting on taser deaths in the U.S. and Canada, and for raising the same questions about the taser's alleged safety as are asked here. I have gone USA Today one better and presented some of the biomedical realities of what the taser actually does to the human body. There are abundant, solid, scientific and medical facts available to make Taser International's claims of the weapon's safety somewhat dubious, at best. The one fact that not even Taser International can deny is that the taser inflicts an instantaneous electrical shock severe enough to render the victim helpless to move or resist. That is what they claim in their own marketing brochures. It is their biggest selling point.
I have spent 30 years closely studying what science and medicine have as yet learned about the substances and structures of nerves, the brain, the spinal cord, how they work, and how pain works on all of the various systems in the human body, particularly its effects upon the cardiovascular and endocrine systems where pain causes the greatest changes and damages anywhere outside of the brain and central nervous system. The first thing to understand about pain is that it is the body's primary means to alert the brain to the fact that something is wrong somewhere. Pain is necessary to our survival. Because of that, the brain is hardwired to respond to pain with maximum speed and force, commensurate with a given pain's severity and speed of onset.
It is, for example, not the disease of leprosy itself that causes disfigurations, such as fingers or toes rotting away and falling off, as the myths and ancient texts have it. Rather, leprosy gradually kills off the sensory nerves, central and peripheral, especially in the outer extremities and the face. Its victims become unable to feel any pain when they are injured, thus ignoring minor wounds until they've become infected, often to the point of gangrene, resulting in the lass of fingers, toes, noses to severe infection. Without the essential warning of pain, there would be no way for us to know when we've been injured, or when a disease has attacked an internal organ, or if the heart is getting too little blood from a blocked artery. Pain, in its rightful place serves one of the most life- saving of functions for us all.
However, there is, innate to the brain's functions, a "ratings system" for pains. There are various alert levels specifically related to the severity of pain. The more pain there is, and the more sudden its onset, the greater the alarm the brain sends out. In the event of an abrupt pain so severe that it is "of a kind sufficient to cause bodily injury, organ failure or death," every system in the body is put into an imperative, reflexive emergency reaction/response mode.
Some functions, such as circulation of blood to the extremities, urine production, liver enzyme and bile production, blood sugar production and protein metabolism, digestion and peristalsis are shut down entirely or greatly slowed. Others, such as blood pressure, adrenaline production and release, heart rate, sweating, electrolyte metabolism, respiration, serotonin cascades and endorphin releases in the brain, are turned up to the maximum very briefly. All of the stops are pulled out because the brain has assumed that the severity and suddenness of the pain indicates that the body has been injured badly enough to possibly die.
Shock inevitably follows the first alert stage, after a period of time as short as 5 minutes to as long as several hours. Shock, syncope, is the second phase of the basic severe injury survival mechanisms hardwired into the brain/body system. First comes the hyper-charging reaction to help you run away or fight back, and next comes the shock to make you be still after your escape or victory. It is a survival strategy that is in place in the base brain of every vertebrate life form on Earth, from the frog to the human being.
In systemic shock, the body is placed into a state that is almost a natural form of suspended animation. All life support functions are abruptly shut down to the most minimal levels, except for the heart rate, which sometimes will stay as high as double the normal rate for hours. Blood flow is taken away from the brain, skeletal muscles, face, arms and legs, then concentrated in the heart, lungs and internal organs, in a reflex to minimise potential bleeding and prevent movements and agitation. Shock, left untreated, can be fatal. The brain, once shock has set in, cannot necessarily reset or restart the body's normal balance without external stimulation, especially not if there are continuing stressors, such as would ld naturally be the case with someone who had been tasered then jailed. the stress of being in jail would ld deepen the degree of shock by causing the continuing release of higher than normal amounts of adrenaline.
This may have been the case in several taser victims who died while in transport to a jail, or in a jail cell in the hours immediately following being tasered. Since the officers have no way of knowing that the taser's blast induces severe enough pain to cause shock, they wouldn't know to take taser victims to the hospital, as a matter of course, as is the case with gunshot victims. If, in fact, the dead taser victims had all been wounded by a conventional police pistols, their chances for survival would have been far better because they'd have received immediate medical care. At the very least, the same policy of transporting taser victims to hospitals, not jails, must be put into place. Being shot is being shot, whether with a taser or a firearm.
An abrupt drop in blood sugar is also induced by severe pain and can be sufficient to induce an endogenous insulin shock in someone with no history of either diabetes or hypoglycemia. In a person who suffers from hypoglycemia, blood sugar that tends to often run or suddenly drop too low, a taser's shock produces extreme, sudden pain that could induce a fatal hypoglycemic episode. It is estimated that for every person known to have hypoglycemia there may be as many as ten more undiagnosed sufferers. Since it is far more common in women than men, this is but one of several factors that might account for why more women than men have died from being shot by police armed with tasers.
Neither Taser International nor any independent product testing group has done studies on the short or long term after effects of being hit by a taser's charge. Not one controlled study yet, in a clinical setting, where hourly post shocking blood tests, neurological exams, EEGs and EKGs, brain scans, galvanic skin response measurements, mental orientation, memory and other tests could be conducted. There have been no neurological tests done on a broad range of victims immediately following tasering, and no studies done to determine precisely where and how in the nervous system the taser's effects are created, or how far they extend throughout the body, or what changes about those effects in the presence of sweat, or what the specific cardiac responses to them might be. No one has even asked the question, let alone done the tests, to determine if, as is nearly certain, taser victims do go into shock.
With the increasing number of inexplicable deaths from taser use, these questions MUST be asked. Unless we force the issue, things are only going to get worse, much worse. Tasers are spreading throughout all levels of law enforcement personnel like a cancer, from the smallest local constables offices up to the US Secret Service and the FBI. The social and psychological ramifications of this are enormous and ominous.
My advice, should you find yourself on the business end of a taser, do not anger the cop. The pain tasers inflict is, based upon my study of their effects and of how they do work in the human body, "sufficient to cause bodily injury, organ failure or death." Do anything and everything to avoid having a police officer fire that taser at you, because there is absolutely no guarantee that it will not kill you, or else induce permanent psychological trauma and even neurological injuries that could be extremely painful and debilitating.
For now, domestic terrorism has arrived for each and every human being who faces a taser wielding police or other officer. Those who have them will use them: anywhere, anytime, on anyone, without provocation and without any rational need or justification for their use. There is nothing but a guarantee of unbearable, possibly lethal agony to come from attempting to reason with anyone bearing a taser. And it is obvious that tasers have removed the abilities to use reason and to behave rationally from the minds of those who use them.
This is the inevitable, predictable result of giving police officers a weapon that is sold and promoted by its inventor and makers as "completely safe and harmless" for use against anyone, anytime, in any manner, under any conditions, when, in fact, there have never been any objective scientific and medical studies done to either prove or disprove the safety of tasers. However, there is a substantial and rapidly growing body of evidence, found in the dead bodies of taser victims, to indicate that these weapons are far from being so "safe for all law enforcement and personal protection uses" as their manufacturer has claimed.
In exactly the same way and for exactly the same reasons that the pharmaceutical companies have been held accountable and made to pay for the deaths caused by their falsely labeling as "safe when used as prescribed" medications that have subsequently turned out to be intermittently and unpredictably deadly, it is high time for the families of the victims of tasers to seek redress against Taser International, Inc. of Scottsdale, Arizona. As yet there has been no public information made widely available about tasers' many and potentially deadly adverse effects. Hopefully that has now begun to change.
In the meantime, civilians beware. Tasers have given a license to law enforcement members to torture anyone who crosses their paths, at will, for no reason at all other than that they feel like it. If you see a taser pointed at yourself, surrender, in every way and regard possible, immediately, and do not attempt to move or speak except in response to questions orders. RESPOND TO ANY TASER ARMED LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICER WITH IMMEDIATE AND ABSOLUTE OBEDIENCE, AS IF YOUR SURVIVAL DEPENDED UPON IT. IT MAY, AND THE ONLY WAY TO FIND OUT IS TO RISK YOUR OWN BRUTALLY PAINFUL DEATH BY ELECTROCUTION.
The psychological and physical harm you risk, and the strong possibility you might be killed, by not obeying a cop with a taser, is a far greater form of damage than merely being cuffed and arrested. Even if you are utterly innocent, do not dare to argue with any police or other law enforcement officer wielding a taser. Do not attempt to reason, because, with the advent of tasers, the stakes are much too high, and the capacity for reason is hugely diminished or gone from police officers armed with tasers. It is your life that hangs in the balance now. All of our lives hang in the balance now, with every law enforcement encounter we face, no matter how trivial.
I assure you, no one wants to know what kind of pain it takes to make a human being sound like Ms. Goodwin did in that video, nor to have to live with the psychological trauma that it will leave with them for the rest of their lives. No one deserves to be electrocuted by the roadside for a speeding ticket either, and that has already come to pass. Nor should people have to live under the constant threat that at any moment, in any kind of interaction with any officer of the police or government, that kind of brutal pain can and will be inflicted upon them, without one second's hesitation, and with their potential death added to the threat.
However, that is the tragic reality that has come to us all with the advent of tasers. Never have we been so endangered, in the course of living law abiding lives and going about our routine daily activities, as we are now endangered by police officers armed with highly destructive and potentially lethal weapons that they believe are utterly harmless. No drug "epidemic," no "crime wave," no "threat of terrorism", nor any other possible harm committed in the course of a criminal or illegal activity has ever put the average citizen at so much risk of injury or death as the widespread use of tasers by law enforcement agencies now does.
Update [2005-12-7 16:31:9 by Sherlock Google]: Video Up at 
The right-wing fringe has become expert at whipping up outrage over phony cultural controversies and scapegoating the "liberal elite" which supposedly runs the country. (Even though Republicans are in charge of almost everything!)
