don t tase me bro

The term hovered between 9th and 11th place as the most searched for term on Google for Wednesday, according to Google Trends.
The above video has been the number 1 Viral Video for the past 24 hours, according to Unruly Media, an online marketing firm in London that tracks viral video activity on the Web. The Meyer arrest video has received 2.6 million views and almost 40,000 new comments since Monday.
In contrast, the much-talked about MoveOn.org's "Betrayal of Trust," anti-Rudy Giuliani ad received just over 171 thousand views and 59 new blog posts. And John Edwards' rebuttal to President Bush's progress report on the Iraq war received 114 thousand views and 43 new posts.
Many of the leading opinion shapers on both the left and the right, as well as newspaper blogs, offered their thoughts and insights on the incident.
Television pundits across the dial offered their opinions, and those opinions were archived for posterity on YouTube.
Several enterprising individuals have even snapped up variations of the spelling of the phrase as Web addresses. One of them points to a Wikipedia entry for the University of Florida.
Someone has already created a mashup.
A couple of t-shirt designs, and bumper stickers have emerged.
Dozens of people have felt compelled to record their own video responses in a YouTube forum discussion on the matter.




For those of you who've been on vacation on a Greek Island, or are just logging onto your computer from a remote location in China, the incident sparking the worldwide uproar is the Monday arrest and tasering of Andrew Meyer, a University of Florida student.

Meyer barged in line to harangue Massachusetts senator John Kerry during a campus talk that day. The student refused to pipe down after being asked to by the forum's organizers, and after he carried on pressing Kerry for answers, police hauled him off. They forced him to the ground, and tasered him.

Several versions of the incident are up on YouTube, and there's a debate about whether Meyer, known as a prankster, staged the incident in Sacha Baron Cohen-style or not.

Whatever its true nature, the altercation whipped up a tornado of rhetoric that is whirling across forums on the Web, including here at Threat Level.

Policemen, Intensive Care Unit trauma unit nurses ... even concerned individuals on the other side of the planet in Australia -- everyone is weighing in on whether Meyer was acting like an ass, and whether he had it coming to him. The incident has opened up the floodgates of an eye-opening debate over First Amendment rights here in the United States, police brutality and the limits and boundaries of how we as a society should deal with the unruly among us.



"This was really sickening to watch. In the video the kid offers to leave and walk out on his own, but instead more and more of those officers try to force him on the ground and into handcuffs.

What a horrible way to handle such a simple situation," writes "Aaron," one of Threat Level's readers.

"The University and its police department should be ashamed of themselves and embarrassed of the way they looked in front of a US Senator. Totally unacceptable," he adds.

Meanwhile, "Nightwatch," who says that he's with a university police department, weighed in and says that he and his colleagues agree that the Florida police handled the situation badly.

And "Jon in Austin" writes that as an intensive care unit trauma nurse, he's concerned about the safety of the devices.

"I am an ICU Trauma Nurse, and I know there have been numerous deaths resulting from the use of the Taser device -- and no one knows who that next victim is going to be! It could be any one of us.

"If we don't stand up against the use of the Taser, who will be next?"

(Taser International says its technology is a "safer use-of-force option" on its web site.)

"I don't believe that asking a question at a town hall meeting, EVEN IF it is long-winded and perhaps even a little combative, should lead to this," writes Jon.

"I think it's foolish to run and flail from the police like that, but I can tell you that this could have been avoided had the police taken him out of the auditorium and explained when and where (or IF?) he broke the law, THEN talk about arrest (but that seems stupid when they could have just kicked him out).

Seems to me, that the real people who caused the disturbance, were the POLICE themselves, who carried it to an entirely absurd and potentially deadly level of risk to this student."

Those wanting to somehow cash in on the notoriety of the phrase, or who perhaps were like cultural tourists wanting to hold onto a keepsake of the moment, went ahead and registered domain names.

Someone by the name of Johannes Feldberg registered donttasemebro.com yesterday, and Alexander Shkirenko, who apparently was chairman of the college Republicans at Georgia Tech a decade ago, registered donttazemebro.com. The list goes on.

Michael Sarfatti in San Francisco grabbed Dontasemebro.com at 1 am this morning as he was listening to a radio show discussing the now infamous incident.

When asked why he bothered, and what he intended to do with it, Sarfatti, the founder of a baby boomer technology-related consulting firm in San Francisco, laughed heartily.

"I'm not sure why I did it -- other than it's going to be an expression in our society for a long time," he says. "I went to [domain name registrar] GoDaddy, and there was a whole bunch of people who had already registered various versions of it -- I was actually surprised to get it."

"I think it's a hilarious expression -- it's a classic phrase," he adds. "It's such a brilliant line -- to be honest, I think it was a set-up, but it was a brilliant ploy. I'd hire that guy in a heartbeat if indeed it was."

Asked how anybody could want, or plan to be tasered, Sarfatti implied that it's not an uncommon occurrence. He says that he's heard that there are games that people play that involve tasering each other.

"As an engineer I'm curious [about how that works] but as a human, I think I'll take a pass," he laughed.

Addendum: My question for readers: There's been a lot of debate [see comments section below] about whether Meyer "deserved" to be tasered, or not. But the question in my mind is not whether he would have otherwise received a bullet in his chest (as some of you have suggested he would have.)

The question is whether the use of this new technology is justified. In a world without tasers, he would have just been subdued by the police officers until he surrendered his wrists to be cuffed. The worrying aspect of this incident is the trigger-happiness of the law-enforcement authorities.

Several police officers already had him on the ground -- why did they need to taser him? It's an important question: I think we need to define the limits of what we find acceptable, and what we don't with the uses of relatively new technology, since that is how we formulate policy: On consensus. To our police officer readers: I've never been tasered (I pray that I never will,) so I can't appreciate how extreme of an act it is. It certainly looks extreme. But what if an individual has a heart condition, or any other condition that the taser would have interfered with?

The trigger-happy aspect of this disturbs me since there's been a lot of disquieting news on the subject, recently.
We're in Day 3 of the University of Florida "Taser" story, and this morning, Rob Griscti, the lawyer for Andrew "Don't Tase Me, Bro!" Meyer, spoke with Matt for a few minutes. WATCH VIDEO


Photo by Andrew Stanfill -- Independent Florida Alligator



As I've watched the coverage of this story unfold over the past couple days, I was kind of confused as to what exactly happened. It's sometimes hard to understand the context of one of these cell phone videos that gets released with only sketchy details.

Now that a lot more information -- including the police report -- has become public, we have a better understanding of what went down.

In my view, this was a publicity stunt -- but one with a message. That message has largely been lost in the questions of whether Meyer's free speech was infringed, whether police overreacted or whether he's simply desperate for attention (or all of the above).

Our reaction -- as members of the news media, as viewers and consumers of culture -- is the point.

According to an article in the Gainesville Sun, Meyer wrote a post on his Web site about how the media is too focused on entertainment and not on more important stories, like the Iraq war.

He wrote, "The news is designed to keep viewers watching and sedated and not thinking bad thoughts about America, because that would be bad for the economy. Stories about a severely unbalanced budget are out, train wrecks like Paris and Anna are in. A train wreck may be senseless and pointless, but Americans sure do love to watch."

This guy saw an opportunity to prove his point, and with the help of the police, he did it even more effectively than he could have dreamed.

At one point, Meyer was a student writer for the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel, where he wrote of himself, "Andrew tries to write mostly whimsical nonsense columns about nothing in particular, yet occasionally finds himself angry enough to rain down fire and brimstone on an unsuspecting politician or celebrity."

I don't think there's any doubt that he went to this lecture with Senator Kerry intending to make a scene (there is plenty of evidence on his Web site that he views himself as something of a prankster), hoping to turn a harangue into a video worthy of posting on YouTube and his own site.

He says he wanted to ask Kerry about supposedly important issues, one of which was whether Kerry and President Bush were members of the Yale secret society Skull and Bones. Does a question like that have anything to do with discourse on Iraq? Was he trying to suggest that Kerry and Bush are secretly in cahoots because of their past connections? I have no idea.

Before launching into his diatribe, Meyer made sure that cell phone cameras were rolling to catch whatever happened. He was probably hoping to get Kerry to say or do something embarrassing. Instead, he got something else.

He famously got Tasered and arrested, though according to the police report, he later told officers, "I am not mad at you guys, you didn't do anything wrong, you were just trying to do your job."

More to the point, he got something even more than an embarrassing YouTube moment: he turned himself into a national figure. And a least for a few days anyway, we're all watching.

In the wake of the shocking event caught on camera at the University of Florida last week, in which a student disrupting a John Kerry stump speech got "tasered", we've been hearing, reading, and viewing quite a bit about excessive police force and the use of the Taser gun ― developed and marketed by the Taser International (TASR).



I'll leave the analysis of the particular event to the New York Times , to Wired, and to The Washington Post, but I thought it would be interesting to drill down on Taser's stock after the company has received so much attention.

I remember trading (or trying to trade) the stock back when I was a hedge fund analyst in 2003. There was all sorts of positive news on the stock and what we felt to be the short squeeze to end all short squeezes. The stock rocketed up over 2000% in that year and was up another 300% in 2004. Needless to say, the small cap TASR found its way onto many institutional and retail radar screens.

TASER International develops "electronic control devices" designed for use in law enforcement, corrections and personal defense. Taser makes both a product designed for law enforcement market as well as a consumer version. The Taser products are capable of subduing an opponent by skin conduction (you actually touch it to the skin/clothing and zap) or by shooting connected probes out onto a suspect and shocking him remotely. Cool stuff - and in the wake of a lot of police fatalities, local law enforcement agencies flocked to it.

TASR has seen a steep growth curve in its revenues, growing 180% from 2003 to 2004. Revs have been erratic since, and 2006 saw the same levels as 2004 but with a serious decline in profitability. TASR reported strong 2Q07 earnings of $.06 ― in-line with consensus and off of revenues of $26 million. The company saw $5M in international sales which appear to have accelerated.

Jeffries and Co. expects a long-term growth rate of 40%, citing Taser's new C2 product as expanding both domestic and international volume. There are numerous large law enforcement and consumer market opportunities out there for Taser. Jeffries thinks that TASR should be able to expand operating margins to the mid 30% range and ROIC to 50% ― both pretty juicy.

For TASR to reach these goals, a lot is built-in to the Taser story. Namely:

25% of gun owners buy a Taser over the next 10 years
about 20% of global law enforcement carries a Taser within 10 years
Military opportunities and new product sales are not included in Jeffries' growth assumptions.

On an valuation basis, this thing is really rich when you look at its P/E ― trading at 82X this year's estimated earnings and 43x Jeffries' estimated earnings in 2008. Too rich for me, but if the revenue/earnings growth numbers are right or there's upside with military sales, this thing gets more interesting.

Stories like "Don't Tase Me Bro" are a double-edged sword for the company. While police will continue to use excessive force, the idea is that Taser cuts down the ultimate number of "death-by-cop"s globally. That may be the ultimate payoff for Taser.

Disclosure: Author's fund does not have a position in TASR, although I'm contemplating buying one for all the cops in my life.