The hugely popular YouTube slow motion video series The Slow Mo Guys have been striving to deliver alternative views of everyday events since their first video was uploaded in 2010. And whilst Englishmen Gavin Free and Daniel Gruchy do educate their six million subscribers – by explaining the physics behind their slow-mo spectacles – their primary aim is to entertain.
This time round, The Slo-mo guys have another doozy for us – a video showing some poor chap being shot with a taser.
Slowed down to 28,000 frames per second – you get to see the charges explode from the gun and seemingly puncture the man’s skin. As Gavin explains, the coloured confetti fired along with the charged is actually very important. They fall to the ground with the charge’s unique number code allowing for the shot to be traced.
A poor cameraman is then subjected to the gun’s special kind of pain, without the help of a shirt to soften the blow. Close up shots of the man’s back shows how the muscles react to the surge of electricity, contracting as the taser hits. The painful experience doesn’t end there though, as the prongs are barbed to ensure they stay in the skin, making their removal rather excruciating too.
The video explains that people shooting tasers tend to aim to land the two charges above and below the belt line of the target…ouch.
For this video, Gavin Free travelled to Scottsdale, Arizona, to visit the American headquarters of Taser International. Developers and manufacturers of electrical weapons, the name Taser has become so synonymous with the products they sell that referring to an electrical weapon as a ‘Taser’ is now commonplace, if a misnomer.
The Taser X26P and X2 are commonly used by American law enforcement agencies, and are preferred to lethal weapons for obvious reasons. The manufacturer’s website claims that “Taser exists to save lives. Our devices have long established the foundation of that mission, and we continue to innovate today, leading the world in electrical weapons technology.
