The Justice Thomas Braidwood inquiry, in a beautifully lucid, commonsense finding that should surprise no one, has ruled that Tasers can kill. There are caveats, but coyotes who have been on about electrical discharge weapons for at least as long as Braidwood has been inquiring, feel that logic has returned to the debate. Taser International, and cops on this country who may stand to face legal and civil action as a result of their, ummm, overenthusiastic endorsement - Tasemania, if you will - of the damned things, may not.
For the first time in ages, Taser International is not ranked first in the Google results for "Taser". News about the inquiry is. That's gotta suck for sales.
In fact, right after Braidwood's news conference yesterday, Taser International's spokesthingy fired off an email slamming the inquiry's report as "politics triumphing over science".
That would be the science fully-funded by Taser and hauled into a series of courtrooms to legally muddy, squelch and steamroll the faintest scintilla of evidence that its weapon had contributed to any death, anywhere. The science Taser used to sell boxcars full of its products to police forces that have come to regard them as really safe electric people prods. The science that Taser has been regularly trotting out at conventions of police chiefs and various rentacops, to show them how their under trained rookies can be handed stun guns with which to zap drunks and, say, subway turnstile jumpers. The science that Taser has been using to impress our more, ummm, law-and-order MPs when it lobbies them...
Oh, wait! Wasn't that all politics? Oops. Some coyotes just don't know when to stop thinkin'...
