NEWSBYSAM HARNETT

I'm the sort of spectator who's in need of some excitement about halfway through a baseball game — a good double play, some strategic base running, etc. But watching cops tase a 17-year-old, towel-waving Phillies fan isn't exactly why I go out to a ballgame.

Recently, nearly 45,000 people in Philadelphia went to watch baseball at Citizens Bank Park and ended up having to watch teenager Steven Consalvi be charged with 50,000 volts. To be fair, Consalvi had a dangerous weapon that he displayed as he jumped out of the stands and ran across the baseball field. A towel.

Well, besides clearing up once and for all what wins in a heads-up match-up — taser or towel — the incident shows yet again how tasers are consistently used when not necessary.

According to this statement by the Philadelphia Police Department in the Christian Science Monitor, the officer "acted in accord with department guidelines," because the suspect — a teenager on a baseball field — was fleeing the scene of a crime (that is, towel-twirling).

Let's consider what would have happened if the cop hadn't had a taser. Would the dastardly culprit have escaped? Highly unlikely. (It wasn't a magic flying towel). Was anyone in immediate danger? No. (Towels are indeed, mostly harmless; though when wet they can produce welts. If our "suspect" had decided to waterboard the first baseman, then perhaps a taser should have been employed. Unfortunately, those who waterboard are rarely tased).

Most likely non-taser scenario? The "wily" 17-year-old would have extended his glorious run for a few more measly seconds before getting tuckered out, encircled by guards and peacefully escorted from the premises — soon to be forgotten by everyone there, and unheard of by anyone who wasn't. Instead, he's been memorialized as another victim in a long list of the inappropriately tased.

There are some things you wouldn't want a convicted felon to get a hold of — keys to the back door, bank account information, deadly weapons. While banks are getting better and better at protecting your accounts — even I have some trouble remembering if my site key is a teddy bear or a blue heron — the federal government is still allowing convicted felons to buy guns.

Since the passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968, it's been illegal for a convicted felon to possess a firearm. The next logical legislative step is to make it illegal for convicted felons to buy guns, which the federal government did. Well, partly did. It required arms dealers to register with the government and conduct background checks. But what they left out were the private sales at gun shows, meaning that anyone — regardless of criminal history or mental condition — can go in, find a private seller and walk away with a gun.

Watch this video from ABC to get a sense of how easy it is. They accompanied the brother of one of the girls slain at Virginia Tech to a gun show, where he bought a trunk-load of guns. When the murdered girl's brother goes to buy a semi-automatic assault weapon, he was told, "Cash is all you need."

According to Sam Paredes, Gun Owners of California's executive director, the mother in Johnny Cash's song "Don't Bring Your Guns to Town" was wrong. Do bring your guns to town. Bring them to work, out for a coffee, to walk the dog. Bring them everywhere. Dangle them out in plain sight to make sure everyone knows you have one.

Paredes was talking to KTVU about a bill San Diego Democratic Assemblywoman Lori Saldana is sponsoring to end the insane situation in which gun owners can legally brandish guns as they walk down the street. If the bill is successful, California would join the District of Columbia and only seven other states that prohibit the "open carry" of firearms.

That fact comes courtesy of opencarry.org, a "pro-gun Internet community focused on the right to openly carry properly holstered handguns in daily American life." Virginia founders John Pierce and Mike Stollenwerk say they started the community after the Washington Post ran a "series of very scathing articles and editorials attacking the practice of open carry." (The 2004 article they link to is a balanced explanation of how people openly carrying guns in Virginia were confusing police and startling community members.)

Opencarry.org says it is out there to protect the right to openly bear arms for every law-abiding American citizen who wants to have a firearm holstered to their hip while they perform mundane tasks. Yes, I wasn't kidding. We are talking about walking the dog, driving a car or having coffee at Starbucks with a gun.

"They could show up anywhere." That's a quote from Metro Police Lt. Mickey Garner about homeless sex offenders. Not exactly a comforting thought, especially considering how policies modeled on Jessica's law are putting more and more offenders out on the street.

It's worse than uncomfortable. It's tragic. Take the case of Samuel Dorsey, a convicted, unregistered and homeless offender who has been charged with raping a 17-year-old girl. Garner, who works in the district, told local television station WSMV-TV that the police couldn't keep up with him because they didn't know where he was.

You would think policymakers would try to make sex offenders easier to keep track of, not harder. Residency restrictions do little more than address the phantom issue of where offenders live in order to make communities feel safer. In the meantime, it increases the cost and difficulty of police monitoring; and, most detrimentally, creates an instability in the lives of sex offenders that heightens the chance for re-offending.

A panel organized to advise governor Schwarzenegger sums up the problem with policies modeling Jessica's law by saying that such laws "seem to have been made for political reasons or what feels good at the time ." Accordingly, plenty of money has been "wasted on policies and programs that do not make our communities safer, but are politically popular.”

Notice something about those police? That's right, they don't have guns. Unlike American police, most Japanese cops don't have guns, tasers or other lethal weapons. (These are Japanese police and the picture was taken in Japan — the McDonald's pictured is deceptive.)

Returning from a long trip always brings revelations about home. Last month as I journeyed back from Japan, the realization was that America is inundated with, addicted to and plagued by guns.

By and large, the Japanese do not own, use, murder with, shoot drunkenly, or obsess about guns. The family I was visiting was shocked when I explained how easy it was to obtain a shotgun, handgun or (in some states) even a machine gun.

Japan has incredibly low crime rates and strict, straight-forward weapons regulations: "No-one shall possess a fire-arm or fire-arms or a sword or swords." Lo and behold, Japan has not only incredibly low gun homicides, but crime rates in general.

Lack of crime is a little more complicated than a simple correlation to firearm ownership (in a crowded bar late one night in Tokyo, I saw a woman leave her entire wallet open, stuffed with cash and credit cards, on a table while she went out for a smoke). But statistics on gun death in the two countries tell a pretty unambiguous tale. Check out this statistic from the Global Gun Epidemic, a 2006 study on international gun use. In 2001, there were 3.8 homicides with a firearm for every 100,000 people in the U.S. During the course of a year in Japan? .02 homicides per 100,000. The shocking disparity continues when you compare muggings, robbery with a firearm and general firearm possession.

Sure, the argument can be made that U.S. criminals have firearms and so U.S. police need to have them as well. I'm not saying every police department should throw away their guns and immediately go out and buy "Japanese Law Enforcement: Self-Defense Techniques." At $27.95 it's much cheaper than even the flimsiest firearm! (Jokes aside, it wouldn't hurt for U.S. cops to brush up on non-violent ways to diffuse violent situations.). But there's no arguing against the fact that the U.S. would benefit immensely if we were to scale back the proliferation and use of guns by criminals and cops alike.

Speeding tickets aren't the first things that comes to mind when thinking about the Eighth Amendment. Capital punishment and 316-year sentences brought on by absurd three-strike rules, sure. But speeding tickets? Could our founding fathers have had that much foresight?

These days, California is testing the limits of what residents consider their Eight Amendment right to have no "excessive fines imposed." New state and local fees have accumulated over the last five years. Now, what used to be a $100 ticket easily ratchets up into the $300-400 range.

The Silicon Mercury News says "lawmakers are seeing traffic tickets as a relatively easy source of revenue in tough times, and add-on fees are being used to fund services that may have nothing to do with traffic violations, like collecting criminals' DNA." Pretty bad rationale to pay $446 for running a red light, $173 for jaywalking and $445 for driving solo in the carpool lane.

Not only are high fees being channeled into non-traffic related areas, courts are being flooded with ticket holders contesting their fines. San Francisco had to build an entirely new courtroom to handle the increase in volume. That's not exactly saving the state money.

The last place a community wants a sex offender is wandering the streets at night. Unfortunately, more than 30 states have laws with living restrictions that have made released sex offenders homeless.

These laws (modeled after the original Jessica's Law drafted by Florida in 2005) have plenty of flaws — starting with the fact that living restrictions are simply a misguided idea. Iowa has shown some intelligence by limiting where sex offenders can visit, instead of where they can live. However, a majority of states, like California, are adhering to the restrictions written into Florida's original law.

The San Francisco Chronicle offers one window into the dangerous side effects of Jessica's Law through the story of Earl Taylor, a sex offender who is forced to sleep in his truck at night and roam the streets during the day because his house is located near a school. As the paper reports, Jessica's Law means that about one third of California's approximately 6,700 sex offender parolees are homeless. This is particularly an issue in "dense cities with many parks and schools such as San Francisco," where fully 84% of paroled sex offenders don't have a steady home.

Take a look at this map of San Francisco to see the clear impracticality of the state's residency restrictions. Limiting where sex offenders can live doesn't mean the city is sex-offender free. It just means that they're out on the street instead of at home.

Information Unlimited, a "future technology" company out of Amherst, New Hampshire, sells some pretty wild gadgets. There are wand-shaped energy probes for those wishing to monitor the "E fields produced by electrical activity and other unknown anomalies" (as seen on paranormal research TV shows); 2,000-volt fish stunners for all of us too lazy to use a lure (check for legalities on use in your area!); and last, but not least, a modest selection of ion ray, magnetic, coil, and plasma thermal guns. (My personal favorite product is the microwave cannon — it reminds me of a childhood experiment with a potato.)

These toys aren't exactly designed for the average Discovery Channel watcher, and they aren't as harmless as sticking various foods into a household microwave, either. The adjustable ion ray gun, for example, "uses a variable duty cycle clocked oscillator driving a FET field effect transistor in turn switching into a resonant transformer. " Not 100% sure on what that means, but as they point out, if used incorrectly, ion ray guns "can be hazardous" and "induce electric shocks."

Sound like science fiction? Well it's not all as "Star Wars" as you might think. The U.S. military has been invested in laser weapon technology for decades. Just recently, the navy tested a new laser gun designed to destroy incoming cruise missiles. What happened to good old muzzleloaders?

Still, though, if you ask the federal government, these aren't weapons worthy of regulation. Why?

Lasers and magnets aren't what I think of when I hear the word gun or cannon

It doesn't take an advanced business degree to know how important it is to choose the correct sponsor for your product. The wrong person can sink an entire advertising campaign — look at Tiger Woods. Advertisers sometimes bank on the wrong person, but they usually try to start with the right one — someone who represents their product, someone appealing, someone who sells.

Taser International seems to have missed the business lesson. They've chosen Joe Arpaio, one of the country's most notoriously inhumane sheriffs, to promote their product.

I thought tasers were supposed to save lives, not be used to terrorize immigrants, torture prisoners and split up families. Joe Arpaio is a symbol of everything tasers shouldn't be used for. We've written about his crimes here on Change.org, but don't just take our word for it. Amnesty International and the ACLU have been documenting his misconduct and he's under a federal investigation to boot: not exactly a Mr. Clean.

Taser International knows his reputation full well — the voice-over in their advertisement calls him "the world's toughest sheriff." The montage pans through one of Arpaio's tent prison compounds, including a shot of prisoners wearing the emasculating pink clothing that are an often-criticized trademark of his jails.

Want to harness the power of electricity to commit violence by purchasing an "electronic control device"? Yes, you can! A thousand dollars will get you a Taser X26, the model used by law enforcement across the country -- delivered right to your doorstep. If a grand hurts the bank, try the more economic TASER C2 ECD for only $399.95. It comes in an assortment of fun colors --"red hot red," "fashion pink" and "electric blue." The compact, lightweight design lets it be "carried easily and discreetly everywhere you go." And with the TASER C2 you don't even have to go through the hassle of a background check! What's more, for an extra $45, Taser International will throw in a dashing microfiber polo shirt with Taser International's lightning bolt insignia. Gauranteed to shock your neighbors!

Given how police across the country have misused tasers, causing injury and death, it's a little scary to imagine a world in which everyone is packing a concealed, nerve-hijacking, electronic control device. Consider this comment by a taser-toter on a CNN article about recent lawsuits against taser manufacturers:

"Even though I own a hand weapon, during my travels I take my taser. If someone thinks they're going to mug/steal from/harm this 70-year-old lady, they will be taking their chances with my taser."

And you thought being poked by an elderly's umbrella was bad. Sure, every grandmother deserves safety, but that doesn't mean she should carry 50,000 volts of electricity in her handbag when she goes out to do some Sunday shopping.

Still, though, in most states--43 to be exact--it is perfectly legal if she does. Since the bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) does not classify tasers as firearms, they are not subject to national gun laws. The federal government has instead left it up to individual states and cities to regulate the sale, ownership and use of tasers.