the.com/taser
a flashlight that ends arguments by hijacking your nervous system entirely.
means a handheld electroshock weapon that fires barbed darts on thin wires, delivering a jolt that overrides muscle control and incapacitates a person temporarily.
from Surprisingly, an acronym with a literary heart: TASER stands for "Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle." Its inventor, Jack Cover, who developed the device around 1970, named it after "Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle," a boys' adventure novel from the early 20th-century Tom Swift series he'd loved as a child. (Cover added the middle initial 'A' himself to make the acronym work.) So the word carries a fictional inventor-hero inside it — a brand name, Taser, that has since slipped into lowercase as a generic verb.
- acronym origin
- named after a 1911 sci-fi boy inventor, Tom Swift
- voltage truth
- high volts, tiny amps; pain over lethality
- confetti trick
- sprays serial-numbered tags to ID who fired
- the override
- overrides muscles, not just causing pain
- range
- fires probes about 15 to 35 feet
tasers used by nypd — new york police department deployed over 9,000 x2 tasers since 2008
taser x26p — most widely adopted police taser model globally, used by 400+ agencies worldwide