Taser International, “market leader in advanced elec­tronic con­trol devices”, have released their inevitable press release in response to the death of Robert Dziekanski at the Vancouver airport.

Taser has been remark­ably good at dodging law­suits. As far as I know, they’ve never even been stuck with a civil suit for injury or death.

Their press release, help­fully repro­duced in unedited form as a news article by CNN, scolds media out­lets for rushing to blame Dziekanski’s death on his being tasered. They insist that

“We are taken aback by the number of media out­lets that have irre­spon­sibly pub­lished con­clu­sive head­lines blaming the TASER device and / or the law enforce­ment offi­cers involved as the cause of death before com­ple­tion of the inves­ti­ga­tion. These sen­sa­tion­al­istic media reports com­pletely ignore the ear­mark symp­toms of excited delirium shown in the video.”

Yes, they’re shocked. Shocked. Furthermore,

“TASER International is trans­mit­ting over 60 legal demand let­ters requiring cor­rec­tion of these false and mis­leading head­lines and will take other actions as appropriate.”

Which sug­gests an expla­na­tion for the lack of suc­cessful suits against them: they spend a lot of money on their justice.

So how come people die after get­ting tasered? It’s the tasered’s fault, not the taser or the taseree.

“This tragic inci­dent appears to follow the pat­tern of many in-custody deaths or deaths fol­lowing a con­fronta­tion with police. Historically, med­ical sci­ence and forensic analysis has shown that these deaths are attrib­ut­able to other fac­tors and not the low-energy elec­trical dis­charge of the TASER®.”

Cause-and-effect is a slip­pery thing, sure enough. When is a thing a cause of another thing, and when are they just cor­re­lated in space in time? It’s a ques­tion that has vexed philoso­phers and ecol­o­gists and taserol­o­gists for cen­turies. The RCMP are very clear in their own phi­los­ophy, as noted pre­vi­ously.

After watching the video of the man dieing at the same time and place as he was being tasered by police I’ll tell you this: if that man hadn’t been tasered, he wouldn’t be dead now. Therefore the taser caused his death. I’ll tell you this too: the police also caused his death.

You know who should get a tasering? The phi­los­ophy depart­ment at TASER International of Scottsdale Arizona. What’s a low-energy elec­trical dis­charge among pure intellectuals?