Both do the same job, jets capture the data much faster I assume

Do you have any proof for this?



Or this?

Not arguing...just wondering.

Episode 2 of Newswipe with Charlie Brooker covered it quite nicely.

He may have had a spasm due to the tazer and shot himself?

Who gives a [LIFTED].

Kill a man, almost kill a woman, then have a pop at a copper and you deserve everything you get. Good [LIFTED] riddance.

Whatever your emotional response the law is quite clear, you cannot kill another person nor do we have capital punishment.

Law and emotion should not mix.

And in that case it is manslaughter, not suicide. Though why tasers were there when guns were present is another matter. While Moat was clearly a troubled man unless we know why he did this we will not stop it again. The police and press do have a lot to answer for. Until the comments on the news this was not a public safety issue. Maybe new guidelines need to be drawn up.

Do you really need an answer to that?

Well, okay.

The object of the exercise would be to take Moat alive. I suspect - and here I casually become the very thing I am beginning to despise about the wider media, a speculator on the flimsiest of evidence - Moat threatened to pulled the trigger. Perhaps he decided the pizza order wasn't going to arrive after all, he was wet, cold, pissed off and generally at his wits end, and pulled the trigger to end it anyway. Perhaps the taser was then fired instinctively in order to prevent further injury if Moat hadn't killed himself outright (as it seems to have been the case, though he died of his injuries).

I'm now going to listen to some soothing birdsong for a while, because the way the media covered this whole thing has annoyed me intensely.

Further reading:
http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/co ... 20927.html
http://enemiesofreason.co.uk/2010/07/11 ... he-bottom/
http://www.mjrobbins.net/?p=10439
http://snaptophobic.posterous.com/did-it-really

I can only speculate becasue I wasnt there but given this guy had already killed one and attempted to kill two more, plus the fact he had a shotgun held to his own head, I presume the tazer was meant to disarm him. If -- IF -- the gun fired as a result of the tazer going off then my response is simply that I dont care. He put himself in the situation in the first place.

Indeed he did, I'm not disputing that at all nor do I have any sympathy for him.

His family, friends and children I do have sympathy for however.

Further to HK's links, I have to agree. It didn't 'grip' me, nor should it do, it's not a soap opera. God knows the 24 hour news tried to make it grip everybody though. After the murder and injuries basically nothing happened for about a week, nothing, and yet it seemed to take up every second of every minute of 'news'.

The fact that Moat responded to the media and the threat apparently went from being specific to general was a godsend for 24 hour news. Now they could try and scare everybody into being interested.

And now all we have is specualtion, which is as useful as just coming up with any old random idea. We have no facts yet.

My point was that tasers cause spasms and convulsions. A convulsion with someones finger on the trigger is going to cause it to fire. That was why I was asking was was it there? Also the guns could have contained bean bags and other non lethal rounds. There were enough police guns there so it would have not increased the risk to the police or public. He could have been taken alive.

Yes I would prefer he was taken alive not so that he should be punished, he was already in breach of his license so no problems about holding him.

Because over the past few years tasers have been doled out to the Police in their thousands.

Northumbria Police just so happen to have used them more than the Met so it's not surprising that they were there.

I still think the sequence was like this:

Moat pulls the trigger > Cop fires taser in effort to incapacitate him and prevent further harm.

Remember, the police wanted Moat alive if they could manage it.

I really don't think the firearms officers would have been armed with soft rounds. I understand it's usual to "shoot at torso" as it's very difficult to aim at anyone dangerous and incapacitate them with bullets.

The fact that they have loads of them, does not preclude the fact that if a place like Northumbria has used it more than London then something is seriously wrong in Northumbria with its use and training.

The press on 'non lethal rounds' is way overstated. You can have 'baton rounds/rubber bullets' but they're not actually rubber bullets at all. And you don't fire them from the kind of guns the police there seemed to be armed with.

The main firearm the police at the scene seemed to have was a H&K G36C. That's a military grade assault rifle (well, carbine version of one). No matter what you put in that in the way of projectile, it's going to do you a fair amount of harm if you're shot by it. You can fire 'sandbag' rounds from a shotgun but they just don't mechanically work from a gun like that. If they were going to shoot him, there was a fair chance they were going to kill him.

IMO, I think the notion that somebody shot him with a tazer and the spasm caused him to fire his gun is feasible, however it is useful to consider the circumstances when they would have used that device on him. If they wanted to try and incapacitate him during the standoff they had hours to do that and had shown no real interest in doing so, they seemed happy to wait it out. My theory is the officer who fired the tazer did so because he believed Moat was about to fire the gun anyway - it was a last ditch effort to try to stop Moat killing himself when the officer believed that was an immediate and likely event. It may well have been that he was indeed going to do so and all the tazer shot did was turn a voluntary act into an involuntary one, or it may have been that the officer jumped the gun (no pun intended). I suspect we won't ever know for sure because I can't honestly see the judiciary making much of an effort to prosecute any officer under the circumstances.

Yes but how does shooting him with a taser after he has shot himself prevent further harm?

I am thinking that it will be more likely that cop fires taser>convulsions cause moat to pull trigger unintentionally.

The negotiations were going well. And a death would stop any embarrassing revelations from Moat in court or elsewhere. Not that I think that it was planned. Just a itchy trigger finger from jumpy copper. That would make it manslaughter rather than suicide.