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Well, that’s CES over with for another year and, for the first time since starting CES coverage three years ago, I’m damn glad to be back home.
The main reason being that rather than get to play on lots of cools gadgets, which I did, it was all kinda overshadowed by being tasered.
Now I know you’re all thinking I’m most certainly short of a few sandwiches in my picnic basket for agreeing to it in the first place but what you don’t see on the video is the long chat I had with the Taser International guys beforehand. ALL of them have been tasered multiple times as they’ve tested their products and, from the experience I’ve had, I can see a valid case for tasers.
The point of tasers, contrary to what most people believe, is not to cause pain but to take over muscle control, making the person being tasered incapable of movement, the pain is a side effect of the voltage needed to force muscles into spasm.
I’m not going to get into an argument about whether tasers should be allowed in this country as my personal feeling is that the vetting procedure would never be watertight enough to ensure that tasers didn’t fall into the wrong hands. But that said, given the option between trying to stop an attacker with my bare hands or a taser, I’d go for the taser every time… it’s the safest way to stop an attacker and yes, even though there are risks, surely those risks are outweighed by your own personal safety?
You can argue that you could taser someone with a heart defect who then dies on the spot. Yep, you could. But then again, the more traditional method of fighting with them means you could end up with a knife sticking from your chest… or, if you got the upper hand, a knife sticking from your attacker’s chest… and given the choice between a coffin or a jail sentence, (extremes I know), I’d take the third option of a taser gun.
So what’s it feel like to be tasered?
Well first off, I didn’t get hit with the barbs which, I was told later, actually hurt less as there’s less resistance inside the body because of the moist tissues… plus the electrodes are closer together, so the although the muscle control effect is just the same, the area of pain is less. But seeing as the Taser guys didn’t want to put two holes in me, I had electrodes hooked up to my socks… no skin contact here, just a crocodile clip on each sock.
Now I was told I’ve get a one second burst which would be very painful and would make my legs spasm, which is why two guys would be either side of me to hold me up as I wouldn’t be able to balance. What I wasn’t told until after was that the resistance over my skin and the massive distance between the electrodes would mean that this would be an incredibly painful experience… and trust me, it was agonizing.
The electrodes were hooked up to a cartridge that slotted into a standard taser unit and off we went.
For the first instant it felt like tight rings were travelling up each leg. You know those rubber ring dog toys? It felt like a whole series of them were being rolled up my legs, disappearing somewhere around my groin… but that feeling, though it never went away, was totally eclipsed by the pain that simply put, was incredible.
It felt like cramp, burns, stabbing and cold all in one go. It wasn’t a burning pain but at the same time it wasn’t the pain you get from a cut… it was something else and the result of a massive potential difference being applied across my legs… it just lit up the pain receptors on my legs and they went haywire.
But worse was too come as just after that hit me the muscles in my legs locked. You can see in the video that I flinch twice, first as the pain hits me and then again as the pain from my muscles locking hits me… This pain was something else. Everything else was on the surface of my skin but now the pain was deep in my legs… like badly tearing a muscle but with no one point of pain, just all over. My ankles, calves, knees and thighs were all flaring up as if the muscles were tearing themselves apart… it really was one of the most painful things I’ve ever experienced.
And then it stopped. My legs turned to jelly and I collapsed to the floor. But the amazing thing was that the pain was instantly gone too. There really was no pain, just the memory of it and, a few seconds later, the shock of what had just happened. This was the weirdest thing… there was no ache, no dull throb, no tenderness or soreness… my legs were fine and under control again… I was just in shock about how much it hurt.
As you can see in the vid, a few seconds after getting zapped I stand up and can walk again.
And from that experience I can honestly say that if ever anyone threatens to tase me, I’ll just surrender right there and then as the shock of the whole thing really took it out of me.
Oddly enough, for the rest of the day I was quite pissed off. I don’t know why, I was just in a bad mood. So perhaps tasering does have one side effect, in that it’s so shockingly painful and effective that you get very pissed off about it.
Anyway, that was the most extreme thing I’ll ever do for HEXUS but I’ve been promised that when Humane Projectile show off the latest in rubber bullets next year, I’m not the one testing them.
PS. The vid got a lot of linking around and I'd just like to thank those that mailed me, from tech companies and other hardware sites telling me I was a nutter but giving me props for doing it.
To those few detractors who reckoned I hammed it up for the cameras, try it out yourself first and THEN tell me I screamed too much.
Originally Posted by Dareos
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