On May 3, during a home game of the Philadelphia Phillies baseball team, a 17-year-old fan jumped out of the stands and ran around the outfield. A policeman stopped him with a taser.
I've been hearing a lot of Phillies fans joking and laughing about the taser incident. But, while the incident may seem amusing in a cartoonish kind of way, tasers are no joke. They are deadly weapons.
And so some are rightly questioning the cop's judgment in using a taser on that unarmed kid in the ballpark. It certainly seems like an excessive use of force, given that the kid was waving a towel, not a gun. He was no danger to anyone, he was just stupidly making a spectacle of himself. How does that justify tasing him?
According to Amnesty International, since June 2001, more than 351 individuals have died in the U.S. after being shocked by police tasers. While some of those people may have had underlying medical conditions that were triggered or worsened with the taser shock and which ultimately caused their death (as TASER International, Inc., likes to suggest), I don't see that as a reason to downplay the risks of taser use. Rather, I see it as a reason to further limit their use and practice extra caution.
As for the incident at the ballpark, the cop and the kid should both be very, very grateful that the latter wasn't seriously injured -- or worse.
I hope they will both learn a lesson from this.
But, knowing human nature, I will not count on it.
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