Tasers Are Really Dangerous? Who Knew!

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Now, with the recent British Columbia conference, spurred by the death of a man who was tasered at Vancouver International Airport last October, and the report of Zian Tseng, a San Francisco cardiologist and electrophysiologist, those who oppose the growing use of tasers will have hard facts to work with. After the report of a taser-related death in 2005, Dr Tseng became interested in the possibility that tasers could cause fatal heart fibrillation. He made the suggestion in a newspaper interview and was almost immediately contacted by Taser International, Inc., and asked to reconsider. "They even offered to ... give me grant money for research." This is a typical move when an industry is threatened by the possible revelation of unsavory facts.

But there was much more on the unsavory side of the ledger. Not only was the safety testing seriously flawed, many of the studies which “proved” the safety of tasers were financed by Taser International, and some of the authors of a 2005 study were employees of the company. Does anyone hear echoes of numerous pharmaceutical industry scandals?

One of the most critical failures of testing was that heart rates were monitored only before and after a human volunteer was shocked. Dr. Tseng pointed out that the fibrillation that would occur during a tasering would not necessarily be present in later monitoring, and wouldn’t show up at all in an autopsy. As usual in such testing, only healthy subjects were used, so there was no information about what would happen if someone with a heart condition received a shock. As if these research flaws weren’t serious enough, it seems that some of the tests were conducted with simulated taser guns, not the real thing.

Dr Tseng said that the chance of the heart rate being disrupted increases fatally when the barbs are embedded close to the heart. High levels of adrenaline, which would be typical of a confrontational encounter with police, are also a factor increasing the possibility of death, as are drug use, heart disease and even high blood acidity.

Many of the reported deaths also involved multiple barbs being fired into a person. If I recall past articles correctly, much of the safety claim rests on the assumption that a person will be hit once, and that the shock is survivable. In real life, that assumption may be fatal. Tasers are becoming the weapon of choice even when less violent means of containing a situation are available, and they are being used indiscriminately against people who are obviously sick or unable to resist, and against young children.