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Taser says newest stun gun fails to subdue some suspects

Alex Berenson
New York Times
Jan. 21, 2005 08:57 AM

Scottsdale-based Taser International has warned police departments that its newest electric stun gun, the X26, has recently failed to subdue some suspects.

As a result, the company has decided to increase the power of the weapon by about 14 percent. The change is intended to make the gun more effective, according to a bulletin the company has sent to police departments.

A spokesman, Steve Tuttle, said the change to the X26 did not mean that the weapon was unsafe or did not work. Taser says its guns are successful about 95 percent of the time, although an independent study by the Defense Department found a much lower rate of effectiveness. advertisement

"We are constantly striving to optimize our technology," Tuttle said in a statement.

Taser's weapons look like pistols and fire electrified barbs that are connected to the gun by insulated copper wires up to 25 feet long, hitting suspects with a powerful electric shock that lasts at least five seconds. More than 100,000 police officers nationwide carry the weapons, and the company began selling a version of the X26 to civilians last fall.

In its bulletin, Taser said it had received reports that suspects "were able to gain partial mobility" while being shocked. "In some of these cases, the suspects were able to break the wires," which would break the electric circuit and end the shock, it said.

The company did not disclose how many reports it had received or whether anyone had escaped after breaking the wires. Taser sent the bulletin in September but had never announced any changes in the design of the X26.

Tuttle said he did not know how many reports of problems Taser had received. "It's very infrequent," he said, adding that a suspect's breaking the wires does not mean that the gun has failed.

Taser's acknowledgment of potential problems with the X26 comes at an awkward time for the company, which already faces questions about the safety of its weapons from the Arizona attorney general's office as well as an informal inquiry from the Securities and Exchange Commission about a $1.5 million sale it made in December.

According to news reports, more than 80 people nationwide have died after being shocked with Tasers, as the guns are commonly known. The company says the deaths mostly resulted from drug overdoses and would have occurred anyway, but some heart specialists and biomedical engineers say the guns may interfere with the heart's rhythm.

Taser's share price, after quadrupling in 2004, has fallen more than 40 percent so far in 2005. The stock closed Thursday at $17.57, up 10 cents, after dropping $2.29, or 11.6 percent, on Wednesday.

Independent data on the effectiveness of Taser's weapons is difficult to find. The question of effectiveness is further complicated because the X26 delivers an electric shock only about 25 percent as large as that delivered by Taser's other electric gun, the M26. The X26 has about the same amount of power as the company's original weapon, the Air Taser, which Taser stopped selling after finding that it often failed to work.

In marketing material, Taser says the X26 works as well as the M26 despite its lower power output because it delivers its electric shock in a special wave form that enters the body more efficiently. Both guns put out multiple pulses of electricity each second, causing muscles to tighten and loosen uncontrollably.

But James Jauchem, an Air Force scientist, reported at a conference on Tasers and similar weapons in November that tests on pigs showed that the X26 electric pulse was no more effective than other pulses of the same size. Jauchem has not responded to repeated requests for comment about his study.

In its redesign of the X26, Taser is reprogramming the gun's software so that the gun delivers 19 electric pulses each second, instead of 19 pulses for the first two seconds and 15 pulses for each of the next three. As a result, the new version will hit targets with 95 pulses over five seconds, compared with 83 for the gun's older model, a 14 percent increase in power. Still, the individual pulses from the X26 will be much weaker than those from the M26.

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