Pig Shooting: For Science

Now, now hippies... it's not with guns; it's with tasers!

In an effort to test whether or not police tasers in the US can trigger heart attacks, and other fatal effects, scientists are running tests on pigs.

"Amnesty International has claimed that 70 people in the United States have died in association with Tasers since 2001". Yikes!

The testing basically involves electrocuting live pigs with tasers. And even cutting into the pig flesh, and inserting the taser darts closer to the heart, and removing parts of skin and flesh to see the effects of differing conductivity of bodily tissue and proximity to vital organs on the ability of the tasers to produce a lethal shock. Unsuprisingly live, bloody, carving up and sending lots of volts into live pigs is causing some distress to animal welfare groups.

Tasers are a smart idea. Non lethal weaponry is the goal of law enforcement. Lethal weaponry is the role of armed forces, last line defence and totalarinarism. The bad thing is, non-lethal weaponry is always going to be PAINFUL. It's goal is to incapacitate, and even if you are tickling someone, if it reaches the point of incapaciation, it's not really that enjoyable anymore. Non-violent weaponry would just be oxymoron of immense proportion, despite what Mystery Men would have led you to believe.

The real solution here, in addition to finding exactly how lethal non-lethal weaponry we give our law enforcement, but stricter guidelines on their use. As any form of incapacitory weaponry does have the off chance of killing someone, it's use should still be reserved for situations in which, if you had lethal means of incapacitation, you'd use that, but as you also have non-lethal means, and the current situation could also be resolved fine by using that, then use the non-lethal means over the lethal means. SIMPLE?

Ok. Once more: In certain situations, it is acceptable to use lethal force. Any kind of force with the possibility of lethality should only be reserved for these situations. If a situation could acceptably be resolved by the use of lethal force, but you also have the means to use a less-likely-to-be-lethal-but-just-as-successful force, then you may use that. I wonder how many of those 70 people who died in 2001 from Tasers would have just been shot in the same situation, in say, 1993?

The other solution is to not piss off law enforcement by breaking the law or being uncooperative, and have sufficiently trained, educated police officers who aren't quite so trigger happy, racist or just generally not-nice.