Word: tasers
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...vote on the fee increase, about 2,000 students from the 10-campus system confronted riot police, shouted slogans and blocked building exits. Like a scene out of the angry 1960s, students surged against barricades and briefly seized a building near the main campus quad; police used taser guns on several protesters, and arrested nearly 20. All the while, police helicopters hovered overhead, TV vans with high antennas stood ready and students played drums and strummed guitars...
There was a whiff of the future in the Taser. When inventor Jack Cover, who died Feb. 7 at 88, first conceived his controversial stun gun, he imagined a world in which danger could be averted without the use of deadly force...
Cover recalled his favorite book of childhood adventure stories, Victor Appleton's Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle. "What an amazing thought," he once said, "stunning people with blue balls of electricity." A rejiggering of some letters later, and Cover had a name--TASER (Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle). Resembling a large flashlight, the device fired darts that delivered an electrical current through the human body, briefly incapacitating anyone on the receiving...
...Taser was launched in the mid-'70s and is now used by thousands of police departments and military agencies worldwide. But the device's efficacy has been hotly debated--not least amid the public outrage over its role in the 1991 Rodney King incident. Organizations like Amnesty International have strongly criticized the regularity with which law-enforcement officers use the stun guns, attributing hundreds of deaths to incorrect Taser...
Multiple product redesigns and one "Don't Tase me, bro" incident later, the Taser remains contentious--although Cover never doubted his invention's mission. "I would rather see someone get shot with a Taser gun," he said, "than a real...