Gee Steve, The fact that tasers save lives everyday proving to be an inconvenient truth?

Hot off the presses, just for you Steve:
WFU Doctor: Tasers 'Extremely Safe Weapon'
Greensboro, NC -- In the past two weeks, two students have been tased by school resource officers in Triad high schools.

On Sept. 16, a school resource officer tased a female student at Ragsdale High School.

On Monday, a S-R-O tased a 14-year-old boy at Reidsville High School.

Now some people are questioning whether tasers are safe.

Dr. William Bozeman, associate professor of emergency medicine at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center, has studied the use of tasers during the last few years. He said he found no major link between health problems and tasers.

"It was the most painful experience I've ever had," said Wesley Gilbert, who was tased at Reidsville High School this week.

He received pulses of electricity that lock up muscles.

"I felt like I was being electocuted," he said.

Bozeman said the pain lasts about five seconds, compared with about 20 minutes from pepper spray.

He said a taser hits a person with one-third of a jewel of electricity. Bozeman said doctors use 50 to 100 jewels of electricity when trying to affect a peron's heartbeat in an emergency room.

In a recent study of adults, Bozeman found no adverse affect on the heart.

"Very small children are a different matter entirely from the law enforcement manner perspective as for example a 300 pound high schooler that for all intents and purposes from a medical perspective can be treated as an adult," he said.

In another study of 1,200 real-world cases from six agencies in the United States involving kids and adults, Bozeman found one percent suffered some type of injury.

"The taser can make you fall and blunt trauma or injuries due to a fall is by far the most likely risk. That being said, it's still unusual and unlikely that anyone would be significantly injured," he said.

Not everyone is convinced.

"I am against the presence of tasers," said Guilford County Board of Education member Amos Quick at a meeting last week.

Some Guilford County School Board members question the impact of a taser on someone who has a pre-existing medical condition.

"There remains a theoretical concern of problems related to health issues just in general, however we found in our study that that was extremely rare if at all evident," Bozeman said.

"What did they do before tasers," Nancy Routh, Guilford County School Board member, asked last week.

"The officers have the option of using a metal batton, of using pepper spray or using hand-to-hand combat, and of course there is the option, finally, of using a firearm. In comparrison to those other options, the taser appears to be remarkably safe," Bozeman said.

According to his research though, tasers could have contributed to or even caused death in some cases, but Bozeman said that's never been proven.

Guilford county school board members discussed establishing a review committee to investigate the use of tasers on students, but tabled the discussion.

The decision whether to equip officers with tasers is determined by law enforcement agencies, not the board of education.
More ...

Steve:

Something to take into account is Dr. Bozeman's financial relationship with Taser International. Perhaps it might be important to ask how many of his studies are funded by the manufacturer. Or query whether he has company stock.
That might put his comments into a clearer perspective.

In BC we have restricted the weapon's use. Please read the recent recommendations of the Braidwood Commission Inquiry on Conducted Energy Weapons.
Tasers are now placed just below the firearm in the use-of-force continuum, no longer to be used as an intermediate weapon like the baton or pepper spray. No more tasering of unarmed, lippy or fleeing suspects. There must be demonstrated, imminent threat of bodily harm to police or the public.

Also, there is much criticism here in Canada that CEWs are electrical devices being USED as weapons, that they somehow skirted all federal regulatory scrutiny to determine its safety- no peer-reviewed, independent testing for potentially ill health effects, no certification by any recognized electrical safety standard like CSA, UL or the IEC. That is the same situation stateside. Your living room lamp or toaster oven has had more government scrutiny. And imagine the potential liabilities to law enforcement and municipalities once lawyers begin raising the lack of government oversight that may have contributed to nay injuries or deaths.

Why is there no method in place by the manufacturer for its customers to regularly check the electrical output of the devices? Canadian law enforcement hasn't set up any program to do so either, although a BC medical technology firm has recently applied for a patent for a portable tester.

Don't be fooled-- the daily 'spark test' police say they do, does NOT measure electrical output.

My colleagues at the CBC determined a 12-percent failure rate in the tasers they tested last year. The manufacturer always maintained output variance was impossible. In BC, a whopping 80 percent of our older M-26 tasers have failed to meet company specs. A sampling of these police weapons were sent away to a lab in Ottawa earlier this year for testing. As a result of those tests, all M-26s coast to coast have now been shelved by the RCMP.

So there is no real way for anyone to determine the shelf life of CEWs yet. But the kicker is the manufacturer's specs have never been independently evaluated either. Even if CEWs meet the company specs, WHO verified that the specs themselves are within recognized safety margins?

Bozeman knows better than to use joules in his calculations. What can kill are amperes. VF and other cardiac effects can be triggered between 75 to 100 milleamps. Ask Bozeman if that's true. Then look at Taser's spec sheets. The output of a properly functioning M-26 is supposedly 162 milleamps, for an X-26 it is 151 milleamps. That is well above the medical safety thresholds for electrical shocks, that you'll find in any first year medical text.

Undered-amped tasers could endanger officers, because they won't do what is expected and if they don't perform, extra shocks might be applied, resulting in unintended consequences. Over-amped tasers could endanger people too.

No one, from the manufacturer on down can answer two basic questions: how many stuns are too many and how long is too long in duration of stuns before the threshold of human safety is compromised? And who did any CEW safety studies related to age, gender, ethnicity, body weight, salt and/or acid content in the blood, etc?
Before going to market with the 26-watt weapons in 2000, the only tests done were one dog in 1996 to determine the wave-from and five dogs in 1999 (of which the raw data is "missing". Hardly scientific.

To date, there are 445 CEW related deaths in North America (according to website Truth Not Tasers, which has been tracking this data).

Good luck with your research.

Peter Grainger
CTV News Vancouver,
Canada.

peter.grainger@ctv.ca

Hot off the presses, and in conjunction with BC's restriction on Tasers:
B.C. police involved in five shootings in 12 days, leaving three dead
More ... +involved+shootings+days+dead/2052513/story.html

See my blog at www.Excited-Delirium.com (don't forget the dash) for some quotes from Dr. Bozeman.

He is quoted as saying that tasers certainly "can kill", and certainly "can cause death".