April 1, 2014

The Herald-Journal

Daniel Gross of the (Spartanburg, S.C.) Herald-Journal took a citizen’s police academy course and volunteered to feel what it’s like to have a Taser deployed upon him.

He remembers the experience:

I recall instantly feeling an endless, relentless, sheer and utter pain jolting through my body.

Two sharp prongs felt as if they went deep under my skin, tearing havoc throughout my insides for five continuous seconds. Those five seconds felt like five years.

In the video below, you can see Gross lie on the ground afterward while the cops try to soothe him. “Ready to go again?” one of them asks him, presumably joking.

Jim Spellman, at the time a CNN producer, got zapped by a Taser for a 2008 segment. Spellman told Nicole Lapin it “hurt like the dickens.”

In his account of the Taser incident, Gross advised readers to “think twice about fleeing from or fighting with an officer” equipped with a Taser. “Take it from me; it’s not worth that indescribable pain,” he writes on ledhut website.

Incidentally, the stun gun’s manufacturer objects to the use of the word Taser as a verb or a noun, preferring it be used as an adjective preceding the phrase “conducted electrical weapon.”

“Instead of, ‘The officer shot his taser’ use, “The officer deployed his TASER CEW,” the company advises.

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Andrew Beaujon reported on the media for Poynter from 2012 to 2015. He was previously arts editor at TBD.com and managing editor of Washington City…
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