Aren’t you glad you have one? Don’t you wish everyone did?
by Tony Wilson

My friend Patty is a flight attendant working long-haul flights from Europe and Asia. Sometimes, she has to deal with confused, irritable, and difficult passengers at 35,000 feet who won’t sit down when they’re told, (perhaps because they don’t understand English). “You know, if I had a Taser, I wouldn’t have to smile or be nice. I could just wait 25 seconds like the RCMP does and Zap them into their seats. Then I could get back to dealing with the easy passengers. I think we should all have Tasers. Based on how I see the RCMP use them, I’d use my Taser twice a flight. They’re very convenient.”

Larry sells furniture at a Big Box Store and has to deal with customers who get frustrated when they can’t find the right Sofabed. “You know,” he confesses, “sometimes when a customer stands up in the showroom holding a small chair, I don’t know if he’s dangerous, joking around, or if he’s trying to prop a door open with it. If I had a Taser, I wouldn’t have to guess. I could just wait 25 seconds, and if he didn’t put the chair down, I could simply Zap him. You see, trying to reason with an upset customer for more than 25 seconds is just so time consuming and I’ve got a lot to do.”

Roger waits tables at a restaurant that gets rowdy on Friday nights. “Yeah” he says, “Sometimes a customer gets real mad because his steak is overdone or I forgot to put extra sour cream on the baked potato. A Taser would sure help with these difficult people. Of course, I’d have to wait at least 25 seconds before Zapping them because that’s how long the RCMP waits before they Zap someone. But that’s OK because they have all that psychology, mediation, and counseling training that I just don’t have as a waiter. Besides, diffusing the situation would take more time and effort. Tasers are so convenient. They’re just like “Phasers” on Star Trek, aren’t they?"

But maybe Tasers are just too convenient. The RCMP likes to say that no-one has ever died from a Taser. They die from something called “excited delirium.” My doctor says there’s no such thing as “excited delirium” and that it’s really just a term invented by Spin Doctors because “Death by Taser” is bad PR for the Taser industry. My more cynical friends say that if the people who were killed by Tasers were actually shot in the leg with a 9mm Glock, they might have lived. Or maybe the Glock wouldn’t have been fired at all.

I think instead of everyone using Tasers, perhaps we should all buy pocket sized video cameras so that we could film the RCMP and other police forces at every opportunity. If we filmed everything they did, they’d always know they were on someone’s video, and there’d be a record of what really happened. We could see the truly brave and heroic things they do every day. But we could also see if they actually used their policing skills to diffuse a complicated situation before they fired their Tasers, or they just got lazy. If all of us used our video cameras on the police, then nobody could spin-doctor the facts to suggest there was a struggle when there wasn’t, or someone was dangerous when they were just tired or confused or couldn’t speak English. Who knows, maybe the digital video will do for civil liberties in this decade what the Charter did in the last.

However, I might be inclined to put my video on YouTube before ever offering it to the RCMP. I’ve learned you have to start a legal action before they’ll give it back to you.

Vancouver Franchise Lawyer Tony Wilson practices at Boughton Law Corporation in Vancouver, and has written for the Globe and Mail, Macleans Magazine and Canadian Lawyer. twilson@boughton.ca | www.boughton.ca/people/lawyers/tony_wilson

This article was published in the February 2008 issue of BarTalk. © 2008 The Canadian Bar Association. All rights reserved.