Angry in the Great White North

In the aftermath of the death of Robert Dziekanski, the RCMP promised to review the use of Tasers and issue new recommendations.

This morning, those recommendations came out, and the key one is this: a Taser is as elegant a means of dealing with a suspect as a baseball bat.

That's right -- a Taser is now an impact weapon:

The RCMP immediately restrict the use of the conducted energy weapon by classifying it as an "impact weapon" in the use of force model and allow its use only in those situations where an individual is behaving in a manner classified as being "combative" or posing a risk of "death or grievous bodily harm" to the officer, themselves or the general public. This includes use of the device in both push stun and probe modes.

Wikipedia gives a list of impact weapons:

• a club
• a baseball bat
• a blackjack
• a bludgeon
• a pickaxe handle

So now police have a guideline to use. If a police officer is going to use a Taser, he has to believe that he would be justified in taking a nearby chair and breaking it over the suspect's head. If not, the Taser stays in the holster.

It's about time. The Taser presents itself as a sanitized, even delicate, means of controlling a suspect. It is not. There is nothing delicate about 50,000 volts.