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.

More Science News: Violent video games generate physiological apathy to real violence

Scroll down to the last item on this Australian article, "Violent video games might not be real, but they can render a person less sensitive to real-life violence, claim the authors of a new study in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology".

247 American university students, almost evenly split by gender, were given a free random gaming session by the testers. The games could be either violent or non-violent. After a 20 minute stint gaming, the participants were shown 10 minutes of actual violence, while they were tested for stress responses (heart rate and galvanic skin response). Students who had previously played the violent game had lower (less stressed) responses to the TV violence than those who hadn't. Suggesting that playing violent video games can reduce one's reaction to "real" (well, televised) violence, apathy.

It's really interesting. It is a short term affect study though. How long does this apathy-increasing affect last? I didn't find information in the article or abstract (damn, pay-per-view science) about the length of "downtime" between gaming and watching. What is the affect on real (as opposed to televised violence)? What was the heart rate and GSR measurements during gaming - perhaps heart rate doesn't fluctate as much because it was already still fluctuating from violence, not from any real apathy generation. It is hard to tell.

The study may also have some benefits beyond just giving more weapons for the anti-violence censors amongst us. The military (particularly the US DOD) has been previously shown in favour of recruiting gamers - perhaps this is a valid criteria to go by - aren't desensitized people less likely to develop certain conditions such as post-traumatic stress; or it could be seen as an increasingly bad criteria, as desensitized people might be more prone to commiting certain ear-necklace gathering atrocities...

The games (thanks to Laura, who also mentions previous studies on real non-televised violence and video games):

Violent: Carmageddon, Duke Nukem, Mortal Kombat or Future Cop.
I'm curious if she means the latest versions of these games, the original Duke Nukem is only slightly more violent than Super Mario Bros. (Duke has a laser-gun, he doesn't just squash, kick and throw fireballs; also was it zombie/robot or human version of Carmageddon).

Non-violent: Glider Pro, 3D Pinball, 3D Munch Man and Tetra Madness.

Munch Man and Tetra Madness have simulated violence - chompie chomps up ghosts, and tetra madness' tetris clone seems to crush goblins with anchors and anvils *gasp*. Also these all appear to be Mac Games... could Macs have an affect sensitizing people to violence!?

WoWed to Death

One of the things I've been greeted with since I got home is that a lot of my friends are now big WoW fans. It's not so much a geek thing, it's more that there isn't much to do out in regional Australia. And at least we get broadband coverage. And computer violence is much better than street violence (though, they still occasionally still practice that).

I'm not going anywhere near anything as beautiful as WoW until I have a job. I would get addicted way to quickly without anything else to root me down. But I have been doing research. And it does look cool. It means I can't play Anarchy Online anymore (even though its free).

But alarming is a spate of deaths related to WoW addiction and obsession. Whether its age old catass-ing, violence springing from online disputes (okay link is not WoW),or probably the most disturbing one I came across was a South Korean couple who let their baby starve to death while they went out for "or just an hour or two" to the local Internet Cafe for WoW, and instead ended up staying there over 24 hours. Say What?

And they laugh at me when I say I'm a bit wary to start playing it just yet.

(Side note: a lot of these incidents come out of Asia - I don't know if this says something about people's growing addiction to technology there, or that they more likely to be crazy urban legends)