The idiots who make up the United Nations have sunken even further into the depths of stupidity with their most recent declaration:
TASER electronic stun guns are a form of torture that can kill, a UN committee has declared after several recent deaths in North America.
“The use of these weapons causes acute pain, constituting a form of torture,” the UN’s Committee against Torture said.
“In certain cases, they can even cause death, as has been shown by reliable studies and recent real-life events,” the committee of 10 experts said.
However, the company that makes the TASER has a different take:
Four days after a United Nations committee declared that the use of Taser’s X26 stun gun by police amounted to torture, Taser has issued a strong response. In a release posted on its Web site today, the Arizona-based company claimed that the U.N. Committee Against Torture is “out of touch with the reality that confronts law enforcement officers every day worldwide.”
Taser’s statement criticizes the committee’s reference to “several reliable studies and certain cases,” none of which are specifically cited. And in a moment of brutal honesty, the company points out that every tool used by police officers, such as pepper spray and batons, would fit the U.N.’s criteria for torture—they cause “extreme pain.”
….
That’s because Taser’s devices aren’t really electrocuting their targets. The company refused to discuss the U.N. report with me, but as a company representative explained to me earlier this year—shortly before hitting me with the civilian-marketed C2—the raw voltage isn’t what incapacitates the target. After all, the battery on an X26 or C2 isn’t much bigger than what’s found in a standard digital camera. It’s the current-generated pulse that locks up your muscles, causing them to contract and release hundreds of times per second—the rapid-fire equivalent of one of those questionable muscle-stimulating, ab-zapping belts.
Unlike the effects of being electrocuted, the effects of the Taser wear off almost instantly once the device is turned off. I felt winded when the voltage was cut, but there was no lingering pain, no obvious residual contractions or convulsions. The only proof that I’d been hit, aside from the embarrassing video, were two tiny holes in my back, where the thumbtack-like barbs had penetrated.
So, let’s apply the facts above to a hypothetical situation:
You are a thief, and you are leaving the store you just robbed when a police officer suddenly appears and tells you to freeze. You look at the officer, and see that he has both a service revolver and a TASER available to him to take you into custody. Would you rather the officer fire his service revolver at you or fire his TASER at you?
Well, if the officer uses his service revolver, at the very least you’re going to loose a lot of blood and feel a lot of pain; at the most you will no longer feel anything. If the officer uses the TASER, you will be temporarily incapacitated until he stops the TASER, and then the officer will cuff you and haul you to jail, with any lingering pain gone before you reach the jail house.
However, if we were to follow the recommendations of the UN, the officer’s only choice would be to shoot you with his service revolver. So, in light of this hypothetical, do you really think the UN knows what it is talking about, or do they have their heads up their asses as usual?
As a means to incapacitate those people who refuse to cooperate with the police, and may be twice as large as the officer trying to subdue them, the TASER is perfect. It allows one 180 pound man to subdue a suspect who could weigh as much as 350 pounds easily and without undue risk to himself or others. It is no great logical leap to surmise that since the use of the TASER became widespread, a huge number of suspects are alive today because the officer had a choice other than his service revolver.
Of course, none of this means anything to the UN. They would rather protect the rights of criminals rather than the rights of the law-abiding citizen. It’s almost as if they were all Democrats…
