The Growing Use of Taser Guns

The Growing Use of Taser Guns

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Development of different non-lethal weapons for handling recalcitrant citizens is an vital aspect of law enforcement agencies in a country. The need for an ability to gain control over a person without killing them is a focus in policing method and to answer that need, various restraining means were invented over the years, the main one being the taser gun.

Today the taser gun is in the tool arsenal of every police officer handling with civilians on a daily basis and the number of incidents involving this electric device keeps rising with time. A research done by the American Bureau of Justice now confirms this statistic.

The research report shows that in over 80% of police stations across the United States, taser guns are used as a legitimate enforcing and restraining method. This is a giant leap compared to a mere 7% in the year 2000, when the taser gun was authorized. The taser gun offers an important ability to avoid physical encounters between officers and people in need of restraining or arrest and past incidents show that it’s only in extremely rare cases that people lose their lives due to using it. In spite of that, American civil rights organizations claim that the protocol for using the taser gun is not clear enough, which allows for non-proportional use sometimes.

Data analysis as seen in the report shows that as the number of residents rises in a city, so the use of the taser gun becomes more frequend. The New-York police force, for example, has 1,800 of these guns in use, whereas in Chicago there are only 700. The taser gun, obviously, is not the only means for law enforcement officers to do they jobs without killing or recklessly injuring citizens but it has proved itself as most efficient. Its power, and its affectiveness as a result, cause the detainee to stop rampaging pretty quickly, thus allowing the officers to close an event shortly after it began.

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