Today's TASER Travesty

Sigward Moser, a 45-year-old resident of Muir Beach, California, was threatened with a TASER, and then was subsequently handcuffed and forced to lie on a wet beach for an hour by a National Park Ranger.

What was he doing?

Cleaning up balls of oil that had washed up on the beach behind his home, the result of a fuel oil spill.

To add insult to injury, Moser was then given two tickets, "one for entering an emergency area and another for refusing a lawful order."

Remember, the "emergency area" was his own back yard, and he was only picking up the sand balls that were contaminated with the oil, as no one else had shown up to do it at the time that he started.

The National Park Service, questioned about the incident, came up with this ridiculous statement:

"'They were upset, but we tried to reassure them why trained professionals are needed to do this work,' said National Park Service publicist Rich Weideman, citing health hazards and unintended injuries to wildlife by untrained volunteers"

I'd be upset too, Rich, if I had been threatened with a shocking for merely helping to clean up an environmental disaster. That sure doesn't seem to be bad enough behavior to get the jackboot routine done to someone, don't you think?

I guess that they're the only ones "professional enough" to perform beach cleanup. I suppose that we can be grateful that they didn't bring out the old "for security reasons" pap.

This is yet another in a very long line of examples of TASERS being used as compliance tools to get people to do whatever law enforcement "professionals" want them to do, whether justified or not, as opposed to their intended use as less lethal self defense tools.

TASERS - The cattle prods of a new generation of law enforcement officers.