Sign zee papers

Now, I'm as much a law-and-order guy as most people, but this one really chapped my ass. A guy gets tased for not signing a speeding ticket. (Update: Well, strictly speaking, he got tased for not immediately complying with this Barney Fife's instructions.)

Frankly, I'm getting a bit worried about how quick cops are to use tasers, which should be one measure shy of lethal force. There seems to have been a growing number of tasing incidents lately that just don't quite seem justified.

This guy was in the car with his wife and child. What if he'd been one of the growing number of tasing deaths?

Update: Hot Air posted this video a couple hours after I did. As of right now (19:00 on 22 November), there are 549 comments. I don't recall ever seeing that many comments on a single post there. The majority seem to think that while the driver was wrong and quite the jerk (and I agree), the cop was over the line in hitting him with the taser. More than a few commenters defending the cop exhibit a disturbing totalitarian tendency.

As an example of the attitude of some law enforcement officers, here's the jack-ass response from one of them to one of my comments there:

One too many arrests? …or just one, period.

LoL … and later on down the road, when you’re not enveloped by anonymity on the interweb while playing Johnny Badass, and you get pulled over or contacted by an officer in your real life, you’ll comply and be all “yes sir” and “no sir”.

By the way, the Taser is not “one step short of deadly force” any more or less than pepper spray, or a beaver-tail sap, or a straight stick is. It’s simply less-than-lethal force. As is every other physical option when effecting an arrest of a non-compliant subject. The only purely non-lethal use of force is verbal commands. But then, you’d probably counter that the driver could have been talked to death.

Ain’t that right tough guy?

A perfect example of the "us v. them" mentality that too many cops have (a minority, I believe), which causes them to treat every "civilian" they meet as a dirtbag.