Question about Tasers

[TheVaultDweller]

Sorry if this has been covered, but my search fu hasn't been able to find anything on it.


So, my question is how realistic is the Taser effect from High Tech? I mean the TL8 model here, the one that causes paralysis. It is said in the book that it causes the effect for as long as the trigger is held, and then for another (20 - HT) seconds, and after that you get to do a HT roll (at -5) every second to get back on your feet.

This means that an average person will continue to be paralyzed for 10 seconds minimum, and then have a 4,6% chance per second of getting out. With those odds, I wouldn't be surprised with people being stuck there for a further 15 to 20 seconds. So, we could be looking at 30 seconds of incapacitation after the trigger is released.

This seems rather excessive to me. Admittedly, I've never seen anyone actually being tasered live, but all the youtube videos I can find seem to imply that as soon as the trigger is released, the victim can pretty much do whatever they please. Sometimes the people tasered in controlled conditions stay on the floor a little bit, catching their breath and relaxing the muscles, but they seem like they could get up at any time.

So, should the effect of the in-game TASER be modified? What do you guys think?

Incidentally, I just realized that being tasered for prolonged periods of time (assuming the person holding the taser had a big battery and was really sadistic) could result in trouble breathing correctly and muscle fatigue. Should the TASER have a FP impact? Perhaps something like 1 FP every 30 seconds or so?

[acrosome]

Apparently there is usually not much of a metabolic effect (FP loss?) with the standard 5-second exposure:

NIJ TASER study

This doesn't cover a situation where some sadist holds the trigger longer than 5 seconds, though.

I can't find much hard data about just how incapacitating the EMD devices are. If you wanted, you could survey all of these videos with a stopwatch.

EDIT-- To further confuse things, this study does show metabolic derangements that might be interpreted as FP loss after a TASER stun. Specifically, a respiratory acidosis and elevated lactate level.

Logically, though, not breathing for 30 seconds is pretty benign, and fully recovered with a few seconds of deep breathing. I'm not sure if you could kill someone by, for instance, holding the trigger down for ten minutes. I would imagine that the devices are designed to prohibit this- not enough battery life or whatnot. Also, the torso muscle twitching might be enough to move a minimally adequate amount of air, not unlike some extreme modes of mechanical ventilation.

[TheVaultDweller]

Originally Posted by acrosome

I can't find much hard data about just how incapacitating the EMD devices are. If you wanted, you could survey all of these videos with a stopwatch.

This is precisely the videos I was looking at. To me, they seem to imply that as soon as the trigger is released (within, at most, 3 seconds), the person could act. I mean, sometimes they do stay on the ground catching their breath and whatnot, but they appear to be able to function normally if it was necessary, say, in a stressful situation.

As for a possible FP cost, yeah, I would think anything below 30 seconds is harmless and under standard procedures (shocks for no more than 10 seconds), the person would be fine. The question is really, what would happen if you tased someone for 2 minutes straight? Would their muscle cramp? Would they have trouble breathing/start suffocating? Pain?

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by acrosome

I'm not sure if you could kill someone by, for instance, holding the trigger down for ten minutes. I would imagine that the devices are designed to prohibit this- not enough battery life or whatnot. .

You could probably come closer than you think.

TASERs use lots of volts but only milliamps. No more than 4 by design though some devices have allegedly drifted over that limit towards the dangerous 8 milliamps A factor of 2 really isn't a large safety margin.

Anyway, the usual battery gives hundreds of "shots".

[starslayer]

Tazers have been proven to be pretty lethal when over applied. There is a good case about two Mounties tazing a polish man in an airport to death.

[RyanW]

Originally Posted by starslayer

Tazers have been proven to be pretty lethal when over applied. There is a good case about two Mounties tazing a polish man in an airport to death.

There was also a case of a police officer (in Louisiana, IIRC) who tased a suspect ~20 times for non-compliance over the course of an arrest. The last few times came because the man refused to get out of the police car due to having suffered a fatal heart attack.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by starslayer

Tazers have been proven to be pretty lethal when over applied. There is a good case about two Mounties tazing a polish man in an airport to death.

Originally Posted by RyanW

There was also a case of a police officer (in Louisiana, IIRC) who tased a suspect ~20 times for non-compliance over the course of an arrest. The last few times came because the man refused to get out of the police car due to having suffered a fatal heart attack.

Yep, taser are deadly about as often as vending machines, which is means that they kill more people than sharks, but way less than kitchen appliances.

[Flyndaran]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Yep, taser are deadly about as often as vending machines, which is means that they kill more people than sharks, but way less than kitchen appliances.

Deadly when "misused" by sadists, on poor health individuals, or on those "excited delirium" people that nearly every cop related killing gets called.
Your flippancy toward murder/unnecessary death by authorities is a bit much.

[Icelander]

Originally Posted by Flyndaran

Deadly when "misused" by sadists, on poor health individuals, or on those "excited delirium" people that nearly every cop related killing gets called.
Your flippancy toward murder/unnecessary death by authorities is a bit much.

Every time some uninformed individual cites 'health dangers' from TASERs, it puts cops and civilians at risk by encouraging the use of bullets or blunt force trauma in the place of a high-tech alternative that is several orders of magnitude safer.

There is nothing in the wide world that has not, on some occasion, caused a death. That doesn't change the fact that TASERs are several orders of magnitude safer than any other use of force by police officers.

And independent studies have had extreme difficulties proving that any deaths have been directly caused by TASERs. Over 99% of subjects exhibit no actual injuries from having been stunned by one. The fact that several people in the world, out of hundreds of thousands of uses*, have been killed, is not any kind of argument that this is an unsafe tool.

As noted, several people per year die in the US from the use of vending machines. That is actually a lot more than die there from injuries sustained from a TASER.

*In most places, all cops are tased during training. In actual practice, this is done often and cops I know have done it for fun on each other.

[Kraydak]

Originally Posted by Icelander

Every time some uninformed individual cites 'health dangers' from TASERs, it puts cops and civilians at risk by encouraging the use of bullets or blunt force trauma in the place of a high-tech alternative that is several orders of magnitude safer.

There is nothing in the wide world that has not, on some occasion, caused a death. That doesn't change the fact that TASERs are several orders of magnitude safer than any other use of force by police officers.

On the other hand, TASERS are also vastly more likely to be *used* than the alternatives. If TASERS were only used as an alternative to a firearm (in which case they would be a massive risk reducer), then the number of police TASER uses would be comparable to the number of police shootings (hint: no).