Get Tazed, Pal
Wednesday, October 12, 2005 at 7:04AM in Technology eBay has announced plans to block the sale and shipment of stun guns to customers in New York. With all due respect to eBay, and to New York attorney general Eliot Spitzer, who brokered the deal, this is exactly backwards. Mr. Irresponsible has been saying it for years: There is only one sensible policy for the distribution of stun guns in New York, and that is to give one to every man, woman and child in the state.
Consider the stun gun -- compact, non-lethal, supremely unpleasant. Now consider New York. Or, for the sake of this argument, let's just say New York City -- the world capital of finance, communications, and rudeness. My plan would do little to curb the excesses of the financial community or address the failings of the media. But when it comes to rudeness, which Mr. Irresponsible has studied the way some men study the sports page, the universal distribution of stun guns would be a downright panacea. Let's say you climb into the fetid back seat of a New York City taxi and the driver is blasting bouzouki music through a cheap boom box at just-barely-subsonic levels. You ask him to turn it down, he ignores you, and you seethe straight through the short, miserable duration of your ride uptown. Now let's postulate that both you and the driver are armed with stun guns -- say, the $400 "Air Taser" described in this AP story, which can deliver a 50,000-volt wake-up call with the mere pull of a trigger. Spitzer alertly warns that "You wouldn't want these used in either illegal activities or horseplay," which is just the sort of joyless, schoolmarmy pronouncement you expect from someone who spends all day thinking about the law. And it's true, as far as it goes. But what about a situation like the one described above, in which you have a manners-based grievance and no real way to make it stick? Wouldn't it be convenient to be able to draw down on the offending driver in a safely non-fatal fashion? Wouldn't that at least get his attention? Under my plan the driver would himself be armed, which creates an instant equality and commonality of interests: Although he wants to be able to continue shredding the linings of his inner ears and you want merely to get to the dentist in relative peace, it is much more pressingly true that neither one of you wants to end up writhing in the gutter like a gaffed sea turtle. Thus equlibrated, the two of you have a mutual interest in compromise. Perhaps the driver will modulate the volume. Perhaps you will learn to appreciate some of the subtleties of Mediterranean folk music.
Now imagine this little drama acted out across the length and breadth of New York City, from the farthest reaches of the Bronx down to the grassy slopes of Staten Island, from the winding streets of lower Manhattan all the way out to the distant precincts of Queens. That sound you hear is the gears of society groaning, it's humankind itself adjusting to the strange new notion that other people are affected by how loudly we play our music, how inconsiderately we bore our neighbors on the bus with our cell phone conversations, how assertively we shove and maneuver for space on a rainy sidewalk. And if somebody accidentally ends up on the receiving end of an incapacitating jolt of electricity, isn't that a small price for us to pay to reclaim the livability of the most magnificent city on earth? It's a glorious prospect -- Stun guns for all, and for all, a mannerly new future!
(Oh, by the way: When I say "us" I don't literally mean to include myself. I moved out of that hellhole years ago.)
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