We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
|
Self defence and women An article, found by via The Register , gives a new example of a taser self-defence device that is being marketed to women – in pink. That strikes me as pretty patronising, although maybe not deliberately so. After all, why would not any woman want a taser in a suitably no-nonsense colour like black or red? The makers of these things have obviously not met my wife.
As far as I know, use of tasers by UK citizens other than the police or armed forces is illegal (I would be interested to know what the law is in various places). There is still quite a bit of controversy about their use by the police here. Here is an article on the subject.
|
Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
|
A pink taser is still better than no taser. Let’s reserve most of our ire for the law and not the manufacturer. 😉
Maybe it’s in pink so that men won’t buy it?
Of course, people who attack others can take self-defence measures too. Indeed, it would seem they’re rather more likely to, as they may be expecting resistance. And if you’re going to mug someone, that taser thing would be rather handy, don’t you think? But of course, no self-respecting criminal gangster is going to risk their street-cred by carrying one in pink, so we’re all perfectly safe.
(Unless the muggers are female, of course. Maybe this invention will go some way towards making street crime an equal opportunities career? Go for it, girls!)
My inamorata hates pink… black is her colour… and her weapon (in exile in the USA, alas) is a SIG-226 as per the top of this blog on the Karl Popper book… that is actually her weapon.
If a lot of customers want the product in other colours it will be offered in other colours.
Even Henry Ford had to offer cars in other colours than black eventually.
Perry,
How come you have an “inamorata” wheras all I’ve ever managed was a “girlfriend” or “wife”?
One rule for Samizdata editors and one for the likes of us. It’s not fair!
I believe that I heard on the radio recently, that tazers are to be allowed to be used by all Police officers, not just firearms trained ones.
For us poor ordinary folk, they remain a strict no no!
So whatever colour they are the Law may feel their collar for selling them.
wheras all I’ve ever managed was a “girlfriend” or “wife”?
It is all a matter of social class. One has to assume that Perry rates and you don’t.
Ah, but pink! The police are far less likely to find it ominous (and worthy of arrest) than black or red. It’s known as protective coloration.
The idea of cops with pink tasers is rather amusing… in a disturbing kind of way.
Just so you know, they are also available in black, blue, and some other colour, too. My guess is that they make the pink one the most prominent so that women can tell at a glance that it’s marketed towards them. That sounds likely to encourage some women to take a closer look, rather than skipping past it on the assumption (sadly, widely spread) that advertisements for, or articles about, weapons are not for them.
Apparently, the other colour is silver.
http://www.taser.org/taserc2-5.html
Yeah but the problem is James, that all the people in marketing who think women are attracted to pink, are gay, not women!
They have not met the likes of Mrs Pierce, Ms De Havilland or my missis.
They like black, take no prisoners and have a half brick sown into the bottom of their handbag.
Tasers would just be a bit of fun to them!
Greetings
Is my first opinion but I’m a reader. In Spain teaser are illegal too.
sorry for my english.
Taser makes a good system for what it’s good for. For its intended use, I love it.
However, it is NOT a defensive weapon. It’s not all that great for a direct threat to the user. You get one shot to fire, which will incapacitate the target for five seconds. At the end of that five seconds, you can apply the trigger again for another five-second ride, and repeat until the battery craps out. However, that’s only true as long as you hit on the first shot and both wires remain attached to the target. If you run away, you can either leave the taser behind (meaning no pressing the button for another cycle) or take it with you (thereby breaking the circuit so that you can’t cycle it again.)
Taser talked about releasing a variant of the current police model to the general public, called the X-26c. This would give a 90 second ride, which means that dropping the taser while it’s cycling, and running like hell MAY be an option now. How much ground can you cover in 90 seconds? However, if you do that you’ve dropped your weapon and will probably not have anything if/when your assailant recovers and resumes his pursuit.
And if you don’t hit with the probes, it’s a long time reloading to try again. I can do it in under ten seconds, which is an eternity in a fight. That is, if you even have a second cartridge, which many users may not.
Taser also teaches that the device should not be used without deadly force cover. In English, that means that a cop will not draw his taser on someone needing that level of control unless another cop already has a real gun trained in. That’s because of the situations in which we use them: Arguably not yet a deadly-force situation, but could tip that way in a hurry. They were designed for “Suicide by Cop” events.
Suicide by cop: Accounts for an ungodly number of officer-involved shootings each year. Someone decides that he wants to die, and contrives a situation where cops will respond and perceive a threat. The classic example is someone who waves around a knife and yells threats in front of officers, knowing full well that they’re surrounding him from outside a certain distance (usually the 21′ reactionary gap sometimes referred to as Tueller distance) and are drawn on him. Then, he picks someone out and charges, with the tragic and predictable result.
FWIW: If any woman is seriously contemplating spending a few hundred bucks on a defensive weapon, I’d strongly suggest a pistol instead.
Perry says:
And she is clearly a brilliant and classy lady of high standards and good taste. My chosen violent-thug-interaction-device is actually the same thing. (Although, for her next birthday you might consider a set of night sights. Trijicon three-dots are the heat.)
As for legality, they’re legal to own/carry in Colorado. Using one in the commission of another crime is a felony, though. An answer in search of a question, if you ask me.
(See CRS 18-12-106.5)
I felt safe in Israel.
You’d see twelve-year-old Orthodox kids walking through the Old City holding loaded Thompsons(not drum magazines unfortunately).
Or ‘tourists’ wandering about Jaffa with M-16s.
It is not just use of a tazer that would be illegal in the UK but, under almost all circumstances, its possession. There’s one rule for the agents of the state and another for the individual citizen.
This does not seem to interfere with the sales of baseball bats in the UK’s major cities, however, regardless that there is almost no baseball played and 99+% are clearly bought as weapons. Meanwhile it has become quite hard to buy ordinary functional tools with sharp edges, let alone carry them around. So there are some odd conventions at work.
I haven’t done much fencing for 20 years, but I think I’d have difficulty carrying a foil in the street these days, let alon an epée.
Have been Tasered, for training purposes. Since poster Sunfish appears to be a serving LEO, I will lay odds that he/she has also been Tasered, for training purposes.
The new Taser product seems like a very well-thought-out solution.
Is it a perfect defensive weapon? No, of course it’s not – there is no such an animal. Pointing out this-or-that potential deficiency in its function or its intended mode of use is, of course, endlessly entertaining, and is just a variant of the common-mode form of communication among firearms users/owners, referred to by another regular poster here as ‘ballistic m**turbation’.
The perfect is the enemy of the good. Like Sunfish, I would think that a person who has several hundred $$$ to spend on personal-defence options would be better-served by a suitable pistol. But that’s not an option for many people, and this may well be. A Taser is nothing to laugh at, and this one continues to deliver the goods for 30 seconds. The standard 5-second shot was enough to reduce me to a quivering mass of compliance – 30 seconds of it would make me reconsider my entire career in the field of the acquisitive arts – as well as make me toss my lunch.
As to the colour – who cares? Taser markets this in pink (among other colours) because that is attractive to a certain segement of their target market. Because it is pink doesn’t make it any-the-less effective, nor does it devalue the choice made by the people who buy it. I don’t ever want to be Tasered again, and I won’t be any-the-less fearful of a Taser because of the colour of the case.
llater,
llamas
Perry-my contacts with ‘friends-in-pubs’ also rate the SIG.
I always hankered after a Beretta 9mm, (which they stated was entirely a possibility), but personally they would all choose the SIG.
Save that Taser money and spend it on some decent self protection training. Awareness, an ability to manage unknown contacts and a decent fence will solve more problems than a ‘magic wand’ at the bottom of your handbag. Of course a weapon as a force multiplier is a superb idea, but you have to be able and willing to use that force in the first place.
@Llamas. Why did you star out m**turbation? It’s not as if you were accusing people of wanking…
James Marwood wrote:
‘@Llamas. Why did you star out m**turbation? It’s not as if you were accusing people of wanking…’
Force-of-habit – e-mail systems will flag on all sorts of terms, plus I know that Samizdata has spam-watching on comments which may be triggered by certain words.
Note that the term is not mine, I stole it from another, but it perfectly describes the happy joy that a certain subset of gun-owners and -users gets from pointing out the terminal inadequacies of the choices of others vs the unassailable superiority of their own preferences. You know the type- anything less than their 10 rounds of 45 ACP is totally and completely inadequate. The same applies to lots of people who denigrate the Taser, usually because it failed to completely resolve this-or-that specific incident in a perfect manner.
llater,
llamas
Llamas, Sunfish, and others,
Pepper spray would seem to last longer and be more “socially acceptable” than Tasers.
How do the two stack up in effectiveness?
Thanks,
If I had to choose between a taser and a good (DefTec or Fox Labs) pepper spray, and couldn’t have both, I’d take the spray. Even more so if I were a private citizen
Taser, within its limitations, is more effective on a single assailant. Wind won’t blow the probes back into your face. Also, spray works by pain compliance. That’s not a bad thing, but it doesn’t work on people with an abnormal pain response such as that caused by adrenaline, certain drugs, etc. Taser works by directly manipulating the muscles and nerves, which means that the subject’s pain sensitivity is largely irrelevant.
Also, when police try to control someone there are usually several of us there and involved. That creates the risk (nearly certainty, in my experience) that a cop is going to catch a large dose of the spray. Fights are just that chaotic.
When a private citizen has to manage a threat, he’s unlikely to be working under those same conditions. He won’t have a bunch of friends around who can escalate if the taser doesn’t work, or who will end up exposed to the spray.
Sunfish,
Thank you very much for sharing your expertise.
I think the issue of whether at taser happens to be legal or not is pretty irrelevant in the face of larger problems such as the government’s attitude towards the use of force in self defense.
I believe that I heard on the radio recently, that tazers are to be allowed to be used by all Police officers, not just firearms trained ones.
*boggle*
You can be a Police Officer over there without being trained in the use of firearms?
In the UK? Sure. The last I’d heard, on average only one in four UK police is armed or even has firearms training, and the Police Service of Northern Ireland and maybe one other department (I keep thinking Avon and Somerset, but I wouldn’t swear to it) are the only two which arm everyone.
It’s like general citizen disarmament. It would be silly if it weren’t so frequently tragic.