Article Presented by:
Amy Herndon
Self Defense: Tasers, Stun Guns, and the CSI Connection
Okay, I admit it. I watch CSI. I even watch CSI reruns on Spike - yeah, I'm one of those pesky females that the programmers at Spike just don't understand. Ah, well, I digress...sort of.
A while back I was watching my beloved show, yes a rerun, and one scene really grabbed my attention. Two bad guys were using stun guns. Probably not a new thing, but you know how it goes - once you buy a red car it seems that everyone has a red a car. Well, this is the case here. I own a stun gun, a really cool little stun gun - a Stun Master - so now I'm noticing how many other people have stun guns.
And now I've noticed something else...the police are using them. Tasers, actually. Good for them.
Good for them? Yeah, good for them. And good for the public. Just think about it. Some guy who's down on his luck goes out and gets wired on some meth or something then he decides to do something really smart, something that will solve all of his problems - permanently. He goes and robs a convenience store (you know an ice house). And just as Smart Guy is going to make his getaway, the police pull up. It is a story we hear about all the time and the ending is almost always the same - the down on his luck meth freak Mr. Smart Guy dies. But now that the police are armed with Tasers maybe this ending can be rewritten.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not anti-gun. We have a constitutional right to them and I support it 100%, but if somebody doesn't have to die or be maimed for life I'm all for that too.
The wonderment of Tasers has been proven in studies* across the nation and in Canada as well. In each one of these studies, from Seattle to Orange County, Florida, the use of Tasers reduced the amount of injuries (to suspects and police), fatalities, and general mayhem.
So what is it that makes Tasers so special? Well, they are a stun gun and more. Tasers use a relatively new technology called Electro-Muscular Disruption that over-rides the central nervous system, so even if your target wants to fight back they physically can't.
By incorporating EMD technology with the more traditional stun gun technology, the Taser has a proven higher instant incapacitation rate than a 9mm gun.
The addition of Tasers to the police officer's tool belt is more than great, because now police in cities like Austin, Madison, and Columbus now have a choice. An officer doesn't have to risk taking a life every time he answers a call. An option that police officers everywhere are grateful for, I'm sure.
An option that you need to consider as well.
Yes, consider a Taser for your own protection in your home. Wouldn't it be better to pull out your Taser late at night, in the dark, when you hear the window downstairs open and close...especially if you fired at the dark figure who was skulking away from that window...and the skulker turned out to be your teenage son just sneaking in? What if you had shot your son instead?
The reason I have a stun gun is because I have a young child. And children are curious especially about their parents. My daughter loves to go through my stuff. If I had a gun it wouldn't do me much good because it would be in a lock box - unloaded. I would have the bullets some where else. But my stun gun is right there in plain sight. I don't keep the battery in it when she's up and running, but that isn't a problem. For some reason she's not drawn to it, the way she and her cousins are drawn to the antique rifle in my father's closet. There's just something about guns...
There definitely is something about guns...they're definitely the weapon of choice for most criminals, but just like on CSI the bad guys are even beginning to recognize the appeal of stun guns.
And you should too.
(*If you'd like to read about these studies, the League of Minnesota Cities Insurance Trust did a fine job of incorporating many of them into one easy to read report. They are listed as lmnc.org.)
About the Author:
Amy Herndon is an expert on self defense. She has two web sites that have more information, as well as, tools that you can use to protect yourself: http://www.azhselfdefense.com and http://www.azhsurveillance.com
