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I think you're doing the exaggerating. There have been over 8000 recorded uses of the Taser in Canada since its inception. 16 of those incidents have resulted in death, not necessarily attrituble to the Taser.
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Can you provide the source of your data, Peter? From what I've been able to gather 8000 seems very high. My only resource is Google so bear with me.
"The Royal Canadian Mounted Police have said they are reviewing Taser use. Eighteen people have died in Canada after being hit with a Taser in the last four years."
"The 606 incidents analyzed by The Canadian Press took place between March 2002 and March 2005, the latest data available from the RCMP under the Access to Information Act. (In 43 cases, officers removed a Taser from its holster but did not fire.)...In 105 cases, RCMP officers stunned prisoners they had detained -- the vast majority of them unarmed, many of them native." - CTV News
"Three out of four suspects stun-gunned by the RCMP were unarmed, indicates a review of 563 cases that shows Tasers are often used for compliance rather than to defuse major threats." - Canadian Press
I cannot find any hard data to support or refute 8000 but it seems high to me. Western Canada has the highest Taser use where the RCMP does far more policing than in the East. The RCMP reports indicate approx 600 uses since 2002 with 18 deaths (some of these 18 deaths are attributable to local police forces and not the RCMP).
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My source was also from google, and it was an RCMP official who said that the RCMP and local police departments have used the taser in about 4000 incidents each. I can't find the exact article now, but this one has the police say that 4000 lives have been saved by the taser in Canada, and that it has been used over 100 000 times voluntarily in police training throughout the world without fatality.
www.cbc.ca/news/background/tasers/
I believe the statistics you have are from a report that looked at a specific number of incidents in western Canada, and not all of them in general.