Now, I’m sure that many of you have probably seen this video before, on the web, on TV, you name it. Now, I know that I tend to not put political comments on this blog, but this is one case that I have a number of comments about. But then, today during my English class, my teacher brought up this event because we’re in the middle of a unit focusing on the theme of “rebellion,” and she even showed the video off to the class. I didn’t watch the video with the class because I had seen it the night before. We were then asked to comment on the video, in particular to respond to was it necessary for this guy to get tased, however I didn’t write anything on there to turn in, because many more opinions about the incident began to form in my brain than could be written down on a small scrap of paper in 2 minutes.

I’ll get to the question first: Should he have been tased? My answer: of course not. But as part of the justification for my answer, I would protest categorizing this in the theme of “rebellion.” This guy wasn’t rebelling, in fact, I’d say that he was the most patriotic of the students in there. The First Amendment to the Constitution says that the government cannot do anything to restrict any citizen’s freedom of speech, and that was what this kid was doing. He was asking a hard question. This may sound like a maniacal idea to a number of people these days, but how often does our media actually ask the hard questions of politicians these days? I too have the same question to ask of John Kerry. Despite scores and scores of counts of election fraud that took place in 2004, why did Kerry concede the election on the second day, and why didn’t he even vote during the challenge of Ohio’s election results? As Americans, it is our duty to ask hard questions. I do not see this as a form of rebellion, I see it as a form of patriotism.

Now, I am aware that there have been a number of rumors about just how much control this kid was having over the microphone, with some people who claimed that this kid wrestled his way up to the mikes (which I think is unlikely), and went over time, and things like that. I’m sure that most people have no idea whether those are true or not, but what you do in that case is cut the mike and move on. But there is no excuse for them to then grab him, fling themselves on him, and taser him, especially when they already have him pinned and there’s no way that he could go anywhere. That, my friends, is police brutality, for simply asking a question.

Well, the University of Florida police have now claimed that they did that because he was inciting a riot. Really? That’s strange, I don’t recall any of the other students there getting up and rioting. For that matter, I didn’t see any of the other students do anything. Furthermore, all they have done to those police officers is put only two of them on leave, with pay.

But what made me sick to see was that while the kids in my class were watching this, when it got to the part where the student was being tasered and screaming, a couple of the kids in my class were actually LAUGHING. Laughing! I mean, for Pete’s sake, have you no shame? The kid is being shocked with thousands of volts of electricity, which has to hurt, and (according to Amnesty International) has killed 148 people in the United States and Canada since 1999, he’s screaming because he’s in obvious pain, and they are laughing. And then, I hear some of them later blurt out that he deserved to be tasered. Now I’ve never actually been tasered (thank goodness), but I would think that if you’ve ever been tasered, you wouldn’t want to wish that on anybody. If those kids in my class had ever been tasered, I would think that they’d be singing a different tune.

But the other thing that annoys me is why THIS particular incident has to be the one that all of a sudden becomes highlighted in the mainstream media. Is it because this kid happens to be white? Or is it just because it happened in the presence of John Kerry?

Let me flashback to a similar incident that happened back in November 2006, this time at UCLA. A student (of Asian descent) at UCLA was using their library around 11:30 PM, when the police did a random check of students for their identification cards. This particular student didn’t have his card on him at the time, and was asked to leave, but when the UC police decided that he wasn’t leaving fast enough for them, they pulled the taser on him. Now, from what I’ve heard about tasers, once you’re shot with one, the electricity locks your muscles, which is what causes you to collapse, and as I said, this has killed people before. But what these cops did was tase the guy, then yell at him to get up (which was physically impossible to do at that point), and if he didn’t get up, they would tase him again. He got tased six times, even when he was already in handcuffs. One of the students who asked for the officer’s identification got threatened by the officer that they too would get tased, which, by the way, is completely illegal. Read the article and watch the video.

My point is that I think that tasers altogether ought to be outlawed. Getting shocked with electricity in that way has shown to have harmful effects and even kill people–it definitely must have some kind of harm on your body. These are not magic wands where you can push a button and the person will painlessly calm down and be cooperative: These things are dangerous. And what’s most dangerous about them is that there are more and more of these incidents emerging where police officers are using these powerful and possibly deadly weapons completely irresponsibly. When a student is tased for asking a hard question of a prominent politician in the United States of America, we are now living in a police state where rights have no meaning. This kind of injustice simply cannot be allowed to go on.

Tags: article, brutality, English, human rights, injustice, opinion, police, political, School, taser, UCLA, University of Florida