Apparently, it isn’t torture if it doesn’t leave a mark, or so we are led to believe by the recent study approving the safety of tasers. Since the electric stun devices cause serious injuries in only 3 out of 1000 cases, we should not be concerned that they are unsafe, notwithstanding the fact that the increasing frequency of their use may make even this low rate result in thousands of injuries, including over 200 fatalities already, according to Amnesty International. This debate over safety ignores what should be the more obvious issue: that any use of a 50,000-volt shock stick will result in excruciating pain far beyond that received by beatings or other practices commonly regarded as torture. It seems that a practice is not torture, no matter how intense the pain, so long as the duration is brief and no lasting injury results.
For those wondering how such a simple technology did not achieve widespread use until the 1990s, this is to be accounted for by Taser International’s development of a firing system without gunpowder, so that the device is no longer regarded as a firearm under the notoriously lax gun laws in the U.S. Selling the devices to police departments across the country enabled Taser to expand abroad, where the devices have met much more mixed reception, sometimes being withdrawn from use after a trial period. People in other countries tend to object more strenuously to being treated like cattle.
Apart from its use of twin tethered darts for long-range deployment, the taser is essentially a cattle prod for humans. The short-range stun gun end of the weapon is in fact the same device as a cattle prod, modified only in appearance and voltage. Of course, the taser does more than stun its victim, but sends searing pain through every nerve in the body, causing even the toughest men to scream in agony, as they experience what might be called maximal pain, if only for a few seconds. Even involuntary functions are affected, so the victim loses control of breathing and excretion, and even the heartbeat is affected. Victims with pacemakers or heart conditions can be sent into cardiac arrhythmia. Neurological conditions can also be aggravated, but these sorts of complications are only to be expected from a device that simply electrocutes the entire body for several seconds, in eerie reminiscence of the electroshock “therapy” previously favored by psychiatrists in the treatment of mental patients. The real purpose of the device, whether for cattle, mental patients, or persons under arrest, is coercion.
Here we arrive at the crux of the taser problem: whether it is licit to administer excruciating pain simply to obtain the compliance of a suspect. We should note that even the threat of the use of a taser can obtain this end. It is one thing to use a taser in substitution of a firearm, but more commonly they are used as simple coercion devices in situations where a firearm would be totally inappropriate. The belief that police have a right to use a taser when a suspect is simply being non-compliant or resisting arrest entails the belief that a suspect never has the right to be non-compliant or to resist arrest. Even in the law-enforcement-heavy United States, federal courts have ruled that a suspect has a right to resist unlawful arrest. Giving police the power to enforce compliance through torture undermines this right of resistance, and indeed can be used even against those not under arrest, such as public protesters.
The taser’s predecessor, the cattle prod, has a long history as a torture device, used in regimes such as Baathist Iraq during interrogations of political prisoners. Electrocution sticks are an effective torture weapon, since they can be administered repeatedly to the victim without injury or diminished effectiveness. They generally leave no mark or other evidence of their use. In other words, the very features which the proponents of the taser tout as evidence of its safety are what make it an effective and easily abused torture device. For every act of police brutality caught on film, there are many others that are not, so it is the height of irresponsibility to entrust officers with a weapon that leaves no evidence of its use or abuse.
Setting aside the more egregious abuses, any use of the taser as a compliance device undermines a citizen’s right not to be punished without a trial, as well as his status as a citizen equal in stature to the arresting officer. The pain inflicted by a taser is at least comparable to that of flogging, which we now hypocritically regard as barbaric, though at least in English common law, it was used as a punishment after conviction by jury. Not only are the police now empowered to inflict punishment without a trial, but the threat of this type of coercion creates an environment where citizens cannot speak freely with officers, for fear that any non-compliance will be punished. This undermines citizenship itself, as anyone interacting with a police officer is immediately placed in a subordinate position, bound to comply with any instruction reasonable or unreasonable under pain of electrocution.
If most people are content to be treated like cattle, or rather to have others treated like cattle, secure in the confidence that they will never be among the unfortunates, then the considerations discussed above will have no impact on public policy. On the other hand, for those of us who demand citizenship, we must recognize that police who use the threat of torture to obtain compliance are enemies of republican government, as are their “pro-law-enforcement” political enablers. These enemies of society should be opposed at every level, through financial, political, and physical resistance.
Fascistic tendencies in the United States are not limited to criminal law enforcement, but are expanded into the military sphere, where “pain boxes” are being developed that can inflict intense, incapacitating pain remotely over an entire region through electromagnetic transmission. It is easy to see how such a device could bring entire cities to submission, and make modern warfare even more cowardly than our current practice of dropping precision munitions from high altitudes at night. Such a device would have been of interest to many fascistic regimes, but it is difficult to see why a freedom-loving country would have any interest whatsoever in this form of coercion, though this is the same country that developed the neutron bomb. These ghouls who devote their energies to finding new, exotic ways to kill or coerce people should be opposed from below, and the beast of their creation must be killed by draining its political and financial lifeblood.