So you're well aware that America, with its softie liberal "not-shooting-suspects-on-the-spot"-policy, is a much, much, safer place than all those other localities where justice is dispensed either on-site with an AK/machete or with a baton in an overcrowded torture dungeon, yet you advocate following their example?Bradeck said:Having said that myself, it's now hilarious when used against me.
I am in fact a 30 conservative living in upper Maine, who happens to have been a jail guard for two years. I'm not saying I'm the side of right, far from it. I honestly have no qualms about death, because people can sit on their high horse, and bemoan the tragedy of the woman who fell and got brain damage due to tasers, and start umpteen threads about the horrible fascistic cops, and their brutal ways, but I have yet to see, and will likely never see, one single thread about the people who are dismembered every day in any one of the 6 tribal wars currently ongoing in Africa, or how the Kurds are still hunted and murdered by the Iraqi Army, or the atrocities of the Balkans, or anything else.
You claim I'm the out of touch one? Who's the one on the internet forums for video games decrying first world problems because a drugged up ***** ran from the cops and got messed up? Keep on crying about the injustice of this world, and how brutal the police are. The 4 year old in Sudan with no arms or legs would love to change places with you.
The person in question never responded to my comments, so I can only assume that he read them, had a change of heart, and slinked away quietly from the thread...RJ 17 said:Alright my friend, I have to speak up now. It's quite obvious that you have something against police authority. I don't care what you did or how the cops cheated you, but the entire base for your argument is wrong.Blablahb said:Snip
You keep saying "So she ran away, is that excuse to MURDER her?!" Of course it's no excuse to murder her...but the problem is he didn't murder her. Tazers are not lethal force, there was no intent to kill her. As numerous people have pointed out but you apparently choose to keep ignoring: he didn't pull out his gun and shoot her in the back. That's lethal force. That would have been a murder. Tazers are non-lethal force. Their intended use does not facilitate an intent to kill the suspect, only bring them to the ground. The injuries that girl sustained in her fall were an accident, not murder. She's not the first person that's ever been tazered while on the pavement, but she is one of the few that have suffered major injuries from being tazered.
The way you talk, you make it seem like the cop was grinning gleefully while laughing maniacally and looking for the way he could hurt her the most.
You said it yourself: it's all part of the game. Criminals commit crimes and try to evade arrest, cops try to prevent crimes and arrest the criminals. Each player in the game has certain tools at their disposal, a tazer being one of the cops' tools. If you get tazed, it's because you're resisting arrest...which is exactly what she was doing. Now if you're dumb enough to commit a series of crimes and then try to run from the cops, you've no one to blame but yourself for any injuries you sustain.
It's simple Cause and Effect:
Cause: You get taken in on drug charges and hit-and-run charges, decide your best option is to run away.
Effect: The police will chase you and use necessary force (i.e. a non-lethal tazer) to subdue and catch you.
You don't need to be waving a knife around or trying to beat the crap out of a cop for them to be justified in using a tazer. Any form of resiting arrest is justification for using a tazer. There is no way the cop could have known what was going to happen to her. To put it in your words: "that's just part of the game."
Suppose she was a drug runner flying down the highway in a high-speed pursuit. A cop up ahead deploys the spike strips and blows out her tires. This causes her to wipe out and go flying through the windshield to splatter on the pavement because she wasn't wearing a seatbelt. Guess who's fault that is: not the cop that deployed the spike strips, the criminal's for being a moron and running from the cops. I'm not saying all criminals will just give up and accept arrest, but they most certainly should. As this and many other videos will point out: when you run from the cops it never ends well.
That analogy makes a lot more sense than your disgruntled mall cop story...why? Because in the case of the mall cop you have the authority figure just snapping on someone who's essentially just standing there and beating the crap out of them. A more appropriate analogy would be if the suspect had grabbed a couple handfuls of crap and ran out of the store with them, prompting an overweight mall cop to chase after the suspect. The mall cop would likely use his tazer to stop the suspect. And guess what? That suspect has a chance of injuring himself on the fall as well. It's not the mall cop's fault if the guy gets hurt in the fall, the cop was just doing his job in preventing a shoplifter from escaping. By your logic, the second a suspect proves they can outrun a cop, the cop should do nothing but throw their hat on the ground and say "Awww shucks, I'll get you next time you rascal!"
Sure, it sucks that happened to the girl, but the cop didn't MURDER her. There were any number of different ways that she could have fallen, it just so happened she fell in one of the bad ones.
All weapons are tools, and all tools can be used as weapons. This is nothing but semantics.thaluikhain said:In my view, a taser is a weapon, to be used only as a last resort.
Iam so glad ridiculous people like this dont get listened to. I view a weapon as a tool only realistically designed to harm in some way with no other realistic purpose or the main purpose being harm. I cant see any other use for a tazer other than tazering realistically so i view it as a weapon. Tools have uses outside of dealing harm and so are different but its difficult to define a weapon without using the term tool. They should only be a last resort due to being a dangerous, risky method of subduing someone and are not in any way acceptable as an ordinary part of a normal officers equipment.Blablahb said:Ah, the rich kid, living comfortable in a gated community in the millionaire's villa of his parents, without ever having seen anything in all his life, ventures out onto the internet to enlighten us with his moral views.Bradeck said:I would prefer a dead criminal to one who goes to jail
I think that would be impossible considering firing something at someone with it being powerful enough to hinder them is going to be in some cases at least harmful. I mean aside from causing people to stick in place somehow without the harm being done on initial impact i cant think of anything considering there are problems immobility in itself can cause people. And i dont really think governments are that interested in not harming people they are simply interested in making the police look less dangerous when infact they have armed them with highly dnagerous weapons and given them little training or respect to show restraint in their use.Casual Shinji said:It's specifically designed for attack, so I'd call it a weapon.
However, the fact that it's considered non-lethal makes abusing the device quite easy to set into the minds of police officers. Because afterall, it's non-lethal and it makes the job easier. Eventhough the taser can cause great harm depending on the person.
I'm not agianst tasers or cops having tasers, but there need to be some stricter guidelines on its usage.
Hopefully some military eggheads are working on a 100% non-lethal, non-harmful projectile weapon, so we'll never have cases such as that girl's.
I clicked this thread with the intent to point out that there really isn't any such thing as a weapon. You can use a sword to cut a tree down or you could kill someone with a pen. The only thing that makes it a weapon is the person's intent to harm with it. So, yay for loving semantic argument.madwarper said:I fail to see the difference between "weapon" and "tool of compliance". So, I'd say that the distinction is just pointless semantics.
What I feel is more relevant is that the taser designed to be less-than-lethal, as opposed to a bullet which is designed to to be lethal.
Lethal forces are for when the suspect is posing an immediate threat to others.
Less-than-lethal forces are for when the suspect isn't an immediate threat.