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"If they punch you in the face your options are:"
"Ok so how do you de-escalate when the perp charges for you?" In both the scenarios you present, it is far to late to draw anything. By the time the person is punching or charging you from less than 22 feet away (google the 21 foot rule) you do not have time to draw a weapon, taser or baton. Your only option at that point is direct physical altercation. If you try to draw something it's going to get knocked out of your hand during the altercation and then it's a scramble to see who picks it up. As for getting the weapon taken away from you, while it's in the holster, cops really, really ought to be using and training with level 2 or 3 retention holsters. These make it easy (if you train with it) to draw a weapon from a holster on your hip, but almost impossible to get the weapon out when it's on someone else. If a cop chooses not to use a retention holster, that's their choice, but it's trading safety for convenience. As to the Prevention article, it seems to me that if we want to reduce the number of cops killed with guns, then the low hanging fruit is that we need to stop sending lone officers to domestic disturbance calls. This study makes it clear that DD calls are an extremely risky type of call and police should approach them extremely carefully. " they would be ambushed and they weren't prepared," Swedler says. No less-lethal weaponry is going to solve that problem. The point I and others are trying to is that there are very few scenarios where using a taser actually makes sense. Most of the time when they get deployed it's as an alternative to deescalation, or to punish a perp for not 'complying'. They're not intended as a substitute for a firearm, they're a substitute for a baton or physically taking down a suspect, and I think the evidence at this point is pretty clear that they are not any better at being less-lethal. But to get back to the subject of the article, the issue isn't cops using tasers (although there are issues there), the problem we're having is that Taser the company is inappropriately inserting themselves into the legal process, and using bad 'science' and the threat of lawsuits to prevent the actual real-world safety of their product from being analyzed. This is bad and wrong, I think we can all agree. |