Published: September 23, 2007 11:37 pm      

Don’t Tase me, bro - Joel Hall

Maybe it’s just me, but has anybody else noticed that everybody seems to be getting a little TASER-happy lately?

Over the last year, there have been a flood of reports in the media of people getting Tasered by the police for getting out of line.

Just recently, a young woman in Warren, Ohio gained national attention after being Tasered multiple times in the back of a police car, after a club altercation.

Granted, she was trying to kick the window out of the patrol car, the woman couldn’t have weighed more than 105 pounds. Handcuffed and basically harmless, she was shocked several times outside of the police car, inside of the police car, and outside of the police car again.

Just a little excessive. While shocking the woman, the officer yelled things like, “Do it again, and you’ll get it again” and “you’re destroying my cruiser.”

In the same week, a University of Florida student was Tasered while asking questions at a John Kerry forum. After the student got carried away, security moved in to remove him from the microphone.

After a three-or four-minute scuffle, the student was pinned to the ground by five or six security officers, one of whom warned the student that, if he continued to resist, he would be Tasered.

Granted, the guy was acting like a jerk and probably deserved to be Tasered, but he was already pinned down by six people and rendered useless before he was Tasered.

Clayton County had its own nationally publicized Tasering incident not long ago, when a middle School student was Tasered by a school resource officer.

This incident was unique. Apparently, the male student was rather large and had quite a size advantage over the smaller, female SRO. The male student had attacked a younger, female student while in an administrator’s office and could not be restrained by several administrators.

The officer responded correctly by not allowing the incident to escalate further, but it makes me wonder if the culture were different than it is now, would the officer have reached for a different non-lethal weapon, first?

It seems, right now, that we are living in a culture that glorifies the TASER. One of the fads in TV news right now is to have reporters experience being shocked by a TASER first hand.

I, for one, think this is stupid and is about as educational as Fox News anchor Steve Harrigan getting water-boarded on television.

I am glad that as a print reporter, I’m rarely subjected to that kind of public humiliation. YouTube is filled with videos of national and local reporters taking one for the team, and buckling after having their bodies pumped with 50,000 volts of electricity.

The TASER has become so popular that even celebrities are lining up to be shocked. In the short-lived CBS-TV reality show, “Armed and Famous,” celebrities -- Janet Jackson, Eric Estrada, and Jason “Wee-Man” Acuna -- are hit with a TASER, as it is a requirement of police officers to get hit by a stun gun before they can use one.

I’m pretty sure that Eric Estrada taking a hit was purely for the entertainment of the American public.

While the TASER is effective and a lot less messy than conventional weapons, all this Tasering kind of makes you miss the good old days when cops just beat the stuffing out of you. You had to be much more of a threat to get hit by a baton or sprayed with mace. Nowadays, people are getting Tasered at the drop of a hat.

With all of these reporters and celebrities ‘taking one for the Gipper,’ it’s easy to forget that getting Tasered hurts a lot and sometimes kills people with pre-existing heart conditions. They can also leave people badly burned, if the two prongs which shoot out of the gun don’t attach to the body properly.

In addition, few studies have been conducted to track the long-term side effects of being Tasered excessively.

Owning and using a TASER is a big responsibility, one that should not be taken lightly. I hope that law enforcement officials will not lose sight of that in the wake of recent shocking developments.



Joel Hall covers government for the Clayton News Daily. His column appears on Mondays. He can be reached at (770) 478-5753 ext. 281 or via e-mail at jhall@news-daily.com.