How bad will a stun gun mess me up? Is it designed to knock me out or just make me fall down and flop like a seizure patience?
There’s only one way to find out how it will affect you: get shot by one. As you might have guessed from the name, they are only supposed to stun you.
They are supposed to be nonlethal weapons, but they have killed people, so whether they immobilize you or kill you is really dependent upon your physical condition.
This might be a good thread to ask this so…
What happens if you zap a car with a stungun? Will it pop fuses, cause the car to stop, do nothing?
I’d say do nothing, unless you happen to get one probe into the cars computer and perhaps the other one on a ground.
It might break the stungun but that’s about all it would do.
Stun guns are not as harmless as many people think. People die all the time getting shocked, most because they have ticky hearts. But in addition, just falling like a sack of shinola onto the hard ground can cause a lot of injuries.
They are not toys.
As for the car, not to worry. It will not be fazed by a Taser. You need more omph (to use the technical term) to take out a modern vehicle. You will excuse me if I do not want to go further than that.
In South Florida, they have come under intense scrutiny. Four people off of the top of my head alone have died from getting zapped in the past year. Granted, all autopsy reports have showed that the people who were killed were under the influence of drugs, and I believe one had medical problems that contributed to their death.
In Miami-Dade county, a 7-year old (not exact) girl was zapped by police so she wouldn’t run in traffic (justified?).
Around here, the protocol for most police departments is that anyone who’s tased is transported by ambulance to the ER. We typically just see injuries from falling to the ground (plus having 2 fishhook barbs sticking out of you). Most of these patients I’ll put on the heart monitor, too.
St. Urho
Paramedic
Oh yeah, they rarely lose consciousness, but I’ve seen quite a few that become incontinent.
Back in April, someone in my city died after being zapped by a police stun gun. In his case, it appears to have been due to a combination of factors: alcohol in his blood stream (between a 0.23 and 0.27, I hear), plus hitting his head on a table as he fell while being zapped. I’d wager that most “tazer deaths” occur in pretty similar circumstances.
I actually used to work in a bonds office and the agents would use stun guns. But they didn’t really like them We had strict rules. Like if the person put on the bond agreement they had heart problems we couldn’t use it. Or if they were over 50 we never used it.
The same applies if the person making bail put he has asthma, we couldn’t use pepper spray, but we could use the stun gun.
I’ve seen it effect people in different ways. Some will “wet” their pants. Some go out and fall slowly, some hit the ground like a ton of bricks. This is where most of the injuries happen. They fall HARD.
Then in 5 to 10 minutes they come around and they are usually drooling and disoriented. But after 10 minutes the ones I’ve seen come around with no effects at all and they can remember it vividly. They have said to me it’s like a big shock from an electrical outlet.
It isn’t as easy as it looks to use a stun gun. This is because you have to touch both electrodes to the person and when they are moving it’s hard and you have to be right up close to them. And they can take the stun gun off you, as opposed to a real gun where you can stand back a few feet and shoot them in the foot.
First, the barbs that are designed to stick into human skin won’t do much on a car, just bounce off. Maybe they would stick if they hit a tire, but the non-conductive rubber would be unaffected by the taser blast.
Second, even if the barbs dis somehow stick to the car, the metal body would just act like a direct short between the 2 wires, so the taser blast would just short itself out. (Probably more likely to damage the taser than the car.) And electricity that did go into the car would just dissipate in the large amount of metal in the body & frame of the car – the guns are designed for a 150-250 pound human, not something the size of a car.
This link talks about the health risks of tasers:
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/localnews/content/local_news/epaper/2005/05/30/m1a_taser_0530.html