This 'ere Taser ain't dun no harm

Another Taser-related death means another opportunity to reassure the public that Tasers are in no way related to death. "Gosh, we sure lucky that there be people who done what learned about science," says the village idiot, "Otherwise, crazy fool people everywhere be accusin' the po Taser of takin' a man's life. Ain't done it, no sa." Taser-using police forces and Taser International sure are philosophical about it, quite refreshing in our times. So a man is shot with electric current and afterwards dies, did the first event cause the latter? On the surface it might seem that yes, obviously if a man dies after and not before receiving an electric current, it would be prudent to assume that there is some connection. Ha! Fools, say the cops and robbers, I mean Taser International, if only you ruminated on the problem a little longer, let the cud grind rhythmically on your back molars, only then will you be able to grasp the silk-like threads of philosophical reasoning necessary in this case.

It's the old problem of causes and effects. How do you know one thing has caused another? Because they happened or appeared one after the other? Really all you can say for sure is that two events happened in succession, there's no certainty about precisely what the cause is no matter the issue. It's so deep it's practically retarded. The great David Hume's famous often used example of the billiard balls gets at it more clearly. He used to say that we are merely used to, hard-wired or programed for all you AI dorks, viewing a succession of events as having a causal-effectual relationship to one anther. So when the cue ball runs into the black ball apparently causing it to just miss the corner pocket (I'm a terrible pool player) we think we're watching a simple chain of events but it's more subtle than that. So while I nurse my embarrassed ego and my competitor takes the opportunity to sink the ball and win the game, I consider why it is I think I know that the cue ball caused the black ball to move. "Because it hit it and that hitting started the other one to move" I say, petulantly. That's at least how our brains organize the information, but Hume always reminds us that there's really no way to observe the cause at all, it's profoundly invisible, something which underlies the constitution of matter to its remote roots. A cause is merely the word we use to stand in for something we have no means of truly grasping. We shouldn't be surprised if our rather crude 5 senses fail to perceive what's really going on. Better to drink a few pints and lose a few games of pool than trouble our poor heads about it.

If you trekked through that strange paragraph I might wonder what caused you to do so, but just now I remembered that I was talking about Tasers not killing people. Back on track now, one thing is clear after all this Tasering and men dying, the police are impressively sophisticated about it. With the case in Brooks Alberta, no one's even sure if the Taser "was deployed properly." Sure an anxious, heart-thumpingly alert police officer pressed the trigger, but after that... well it's that old problem of causes and effects again. Was it working properly, did the charge make contact, these are questions for the smoke room over a glass of scotch and discussion of the ancients. Did the Taser play a role in the death of a man in the relative prime of his life? Who knows? Best to offer condolences to the family and frown for a few moments at the sadness of it all.

I want to spit about one more thing related to Tasers and death which is this. Be warned everyone, Taser International and the police forces who sign long-term contracts with them have taken up a controversial psychiatric term to help explain these deaths: Excited delerium. It's an amazing thing that such an old world as ours is still offers up fresh newfangled entities for each generation to call their own. So while excitable, probably intoxicated, probably mentally unstable/ill males have long been threatening and committing violence to their families and neighbors, we must wait until the hysterically violent 20th century for someone to muster the gonads to contrive a disorder as crazy as this. Excited delirium means that people die when in police custody not because of the tactics or Tasers being used by the police, but because they're too excited and basically have heart attacks. This was trotted out to explain the death/murder of Robert Dziekanski. He was violently agitated and in a hyperactive state, the multiple Taserings and knee on his neck had little to do with it. Let that be a warning to you, don't excite yourself to death.

Now you go on and leave those po conducted electricity devices alone chillren, they ain't but dun ther jobs don't ya know.