Horizon

"Appreciate the perspective" is all very well, but without something resembling numbers, it's terribly abstract. Some of these stories are more important than the others, but we can't know which ones without some numbers.

Here's another perspective.

Nothing else to add then?

Via today's Cursor, I submit to you that when a society's guardians deliver electrical shocks to children, something has gone terribly wrong.

See this, and this.

Wait a minute, you'll say, the Tasers didn't decide how they would be used; the policemen did.

Yes, but I think it goes back to my earlier point: a hazily "less lethal" weapon is too easy to use easily, out of mere pique or laziness.

a hazily "less lethal" weapon is too easy to use easily, out of mere pique or laziness

This logic would suggest that the police should in fact be striving to obtain more lethal weapons which will encourage a proper sense of restraint.

Maybe it's that a firearm is designed to injure and a Taser is designed to cause pain. Something in my gut says weapons are bad enough but things intentionally designed to cause pain are worse.

A firearm isn't designed to injure. A firearm is designed to kill. I doubt you would be nearly so euphemistic if we were discussing, e.g., the Second Amendment, so please don't do it for opportunistic purposes now.

Both guns and tasers are capable, as a side-effect of their main purpose, of causing great pain. The principal difference between them is that one is quite likely to end your days on this earth and the other one is not.

My consistent position is that anyone who wants it can have the Second Amendment so long as we get to keep the other Amendments too.

And, no, the principal difference between them is that one is *considered* to have possible day-ending effects and the other is *considered* not to.

My consistent position is that anyone who wants it can have the Second Amendment so long as we get to keep the other Amendments too.

I didn't say you were against the Second Amendment. I said that if you were discussing guns in the context of the Second Amendment I doubted that you would be so coy as to fail to point out their principal design purpose.

This is starting to devolve on predictable lines, which is a pity, because the original idea of the post was to suggest that tasers face us with a more complicated problem than that. With respect, I think the difference between our positions is that I'm willing to concede some ground to the anti-side (tasers obviously can be dangerous in certain circumstances and anyone who condones their use has to think very hard about the consequences of that). You still seem to be in the mental lock-box that tasers are "torture devices", end of story, no more thinking required, and that any meritorious accounts of their use must be met with fingers in the ears and a studious la-la-la-I'm-not-listening.