This is a Cop. He controls black people.

I had a discussion on the advent of tasers with my sister's girlfriend who's trying to get into the police force. I argued that taser's ease of use was their downfall since I get the impression a lot of cops are using tasers instead of using traditional hand to hand techniques to get people down...I feel that a lot of times when someone is UNARMED there's no reason why a cop can't just tackle the guy or find some other way to take him down than tasering him. That's if they even need to get someone down. A lot of the cases that have been publicized (and obviously, probably not representative of the majority) are cases where the cops have had their tasers out before even needing to make an arrest, which is just outrageous.

It think the thought process I arrived to was that just because they are a non-lethal weapon, police forget they're still weapons, and drawing a weapon on someone shouldn't happen until arrests are being made or serious resistance is being put up.

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That's true here in Colorado as well, but I don't think that's working in declining their use.

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Originally Posted by Big Gay Chulo

When we've had gun control debates here before, people have said that they want to own a gun to defend themselves from criminals. If your country is so dangerous that everyone needs to be tooled up to avoid becoming a crime statistic, if I was a cop I'd take no chances either and wouldn't even make eye contact with someone until they were safely restrained and the quickest way to do that is clearly for me and my cop buddies to electrocute the shit out them. The cops don't know who's packing heat so it makes sense to me for them to safely cripple people before attempting to engage them in conversation. It's essentially an arms race, more people get guns so the police become more scared of getting shot. Sure they could stick to beating people up with truncheons but you've got to get really close to someone to do that and in the time it takes to close the distance they could have whipped out their assault rifle and gunned down half the people in the street.

The police need adequate protection from what they're likely to be faced with, that's only fair both for their safety and to do their jobs. Over here they're faced with loud mouthed chavs with knives, so they wear stab vests and carry those flick out baton things and pepper spray. Over there everyone is armed to the teeth so using close combat simply isn't an option. They need to pre-emptively pacify the subject for their own safety and that of the public. The ideas of an armed populace and a peaceful police force simply aren't reconcilable.

That assumes everyone who's arrested is packing heat. The issue comes into play when there is CLEARLY not a need for force like said party up in the first post. And with statistics in most towns (i.e. not New York, LA, big cities) being something like only 1% of police officers even drawing their guns while on duty, I think the picture you're painting is grossly exaggerated. Surely if cops don't even need to draw guns during most of their career, the need to draw any other weapon shouldn't be as high either.

To be fair though, I don't know what the percentage of coppers who pull out tazers is...so I could be off base here.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.

But to me, it seems these people who are actually going through the system to acquire a gun probably wont be pulling it on a police officer anytime soon. I have a feeling there is still some humanity left in people where even if they were carrying a gun, they wouldn't feel the need to shoot someone because they got pulled over for speeding.

So while that argument has some valid points, I don't feel you can throw out the human equation in all of this. Does increased levels of gun ownership lead to more gun-related violence? Absolutely. Does it lead to everyone owning a gun to start a shootout with the cops because they have the ability to? No. And at the end of the day, getting back to the argument at hand, I doubt tasers are being used in situations where the risk of guns would even be relevant. I believe if a cop had any worry that a man they're arresting might have a gun, they'd pull their gun out, not their taser. Don't know, just thinking aloud really.

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