TI can be filed under the heading ‘Seemed like a good idea at the time’. The police are always having to shoot unruly people, often resulting in a big fuss, right? Though they are almost never judged wrong in these lethal decisions, it is definitely messy, with time-consuming investigations and big legal bills. Wouldn’t it be better if the cops could let fly without the deadly consequences? In steps Taser International.
A taser is an electroshock weapon that uses electrical currents to disrupt the voluntary control of muscles. This results in what TI (who are great at adding to our besieged vocabulary) call ‘neuromuscular incapacitation’: in other words, you fall to the ground and twitch around and the powers that be can do whatever they want with you. An additional option, if ‘pain compliance’ is required, is for the taser to be switched to Drive Stun Mode. In that case, though, you might end up dead (this has happened to 308 people in the US and 26 in Canada since 2001). TI, though, says that this doesn’t have anything to do with being ‘tasered’ (another great new word) but is rather down to something called ‘excited delirium’. TI and its apologists claim that the delirium hits someone when they are apprehended by the cops and causes them to act in an irrational and hyperactive way. The Canadian Medical Association Journal has dismissed excited delirium as a ‘pop culture phenomenon’.
