About Tasers
This is a short excerpt from a great article of the same name by Mark W. Kroll and Patrick Chou, published by IEEE Spectrum Online, including links to explanatory illustrations. Please read the entire article.
Pull the trigger of a Taser and a blast of compressed nitrogen launches two barbed darts at 55 meters per second (180 FPS). Each dart has a 9mm (just over1/3”) long barbed tip to penetrate clothing and skin. Two wires trail behind for up to 9 meters (20 feet), forming an electrical connection to the gun.
Because the darts stick in clothing and fail to reach the skin about 30 percent of the time, the gun briefly generates an arc to ionize air in the gap to establish a conductive path for the electricity. This arcing phase has an open -circuit peak voltage of 50 000 volts; the voltage is 50 KV only until the arc appears or until the darts make contact with flesh, which in the worst conditions offers around 400 ohms of resistance
In the United States, about 670 people die each year under police restraint, according to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Bureau of Justice Statistics. Studies have shown that stun guns were used during about 30 percent of these in-custody deaths. Tasers were involved in a sizable fraction of these. Medical examiners have cited Tasers as the primary cause of death in only four cases to date (12/2007); three of those were later thrown out of court. Those Medical Examiners and the Courts, of course, represent the same governments as the officers wielding the Taser.