Tasers are the height of impoliteness

Look at this thing! It's not a gun, it's the lovechild of a water pistol and an electric shaver.

Who here among us hasn’t honestly, at some point, wished that they could kill someone not for justice or revenge, but for convenience? Maybe it’s that annoying housemate who always gets to the shower first, or a terrible boss who blocks all your ideas, or that MONSTROUS BUMHOLE stood at the train station barriers, fiddling around with his bag because he was too DENSE to get his ticket out BEFORE he reached the gates, and now EVERYBODY is being held up and it’s been TWELVE WHOLE SECONDS now and this is just INFURIATING and – oh, he’s found it now. Well ABOUT BLOOMIN’ TIME. Tosser.

Wouldn’t it be nice if we could just kill these awful people and get them out of our way? Not KILL kill them, obviously. Properly killing people is really bad. But maybe we could, y’know, just kill them a little bit. Knock them out for a while. Get them out of our hair.

This magnificent dream has been enthusiastically taken up by film and TV, who have to struggle with the problem that violence is really cool and exciting and offers a fast way to resolve conflicts without any boring talky nonsense, but also leads to people getting hurt or selfishly bleeding all over the place. As we’ve mentioned, this is a BAD THING and as such can ruin your movie’s age certification. The solution is to pretend that it really is possible to just duff people up and knock them out without any nasty consequences whatsoever – Superman, Spiderman and all the other “-men” of the comic book world are heroes because they beat up bad guys but never ever kill. The best manifestation of this wonderful fantasy has to be the Phaser, from Star Trek – a wizardly technology that works just like a real gun, except it painlessly stuns you for a bit rather than messily spraying your insides all over the bookshelves. The show’s pitched battles between good and evil are basically a paintball match, but with better sound effects.

You tell 'em, Kirk.

Phasers aren’t real, which is probably just as well. But Tasers are. The name’s almost identical, they look like a kiddies’ toy raygun, and they promise to “incapacitate dangerous, combative, or high-risk subjects who pose a risk to law enforcement/correctional officers, innocent citizens, or themselves in a manner that is generally recognized as a safer alternative to other uses of force.” That is: they zap your nuts off with electricity, and you fall to the ground, still awake, in a grotesque twitching mess.

Before I go any further, a clarification: this piece isn’t really about Tasers themselves. I’m not actually against them, in principle – if they allow an officer to quickly and accountably respond to an immediate threat, without lethal force, then great. However, there’s a whole tricky quagmire of arguments around whether or not Tasers cause heart attacks, whether all those muscle spasms can properly damage you, and exactly how much it hurts to be shot by one. I can’t drive through that quagmire – this blog doesn’t have the tyres for it.

What I will say is this: it can be very easy to get carried away by all the exciting possibilities that a magic stun-gun has to offer, whether or not it really is as non-lethal as it claims. This week, there’s been a storm of controversy around the things, and looking abroad you can find some truly terrifying examples:  like the tasing of a twelve year old girl who ran away from a truant officer, or of a lone man who ran onto the pitch during a baseball game, doing dangerous and threatening things like, er, waving a flag. Did these people deserve fourteen thousand volts of bowel-loosening shock therapy? Of course not – but they got it anyway, because the promise of a quick and easy, consequence-free violent solution is too alluring to resist. It can be addictive – like that episode of the Simpsons where Homer learns the Vulcan nerve grip, and promptly pinches his way out of every awkward social encounter.

Other people can be a real pain. They can be stubborn, wilful, ignorant beasts who get so far up your nose that they could carve a likeness of Bill Shatner in your bogeys. Dealing with them properly requires diplomacy, respect and phenomenal patience – a mature and considerate approach. Toddlers might bite and kick to get their own way, but we grown-ups are supposed to be better than that. So yes, if someone poses a real and imminent danger, then by all means zap their buttocks into a clenching frenzy, but let’s not start using these things as a cheap shortcut to deal with any slightly difficult situation. It’s just rude.