I was recently given a link to the Andrew Meyers tasering incident, which shows a Florida University student getting zapped with some 50000 volts of electrical pain. From what I can tell watching the footage, it would seem he went over his time limit questioning John Kerry at a guest lecture. Likewise Mr Meyers was being an inciteful jackass, but that hardly warrants being hauled to the ground by six security guards and zapped like an errant steer in need of a cattle prod.

In my University days there were always those jackasses who would question a guest lecturer in an entirely inciteful manner, completely uninterested in whatever response they might get (John Kerry apparently offered to answer his questions, but by that time Mr Meyer’s was busy fending off six guards.) Of course, if any of those idiots got tasered in SA there’d be major fallout. In the US this has generated considerable media attention, but the actions of the campus police have not generated outright and universal condemnation. From the clip, there’s a strong indication that he was already cuffed and pinned by the security guards, so why zap him? Likewise, the guard in question seemed to pause for a second and consider whether or not to do it, all the while Mr Meyers is screaming for him not to be zapped like livestock. To be honest I’d be tempted to do it myself, if only because it would be a pleasant distraction from my theoretically mundane campus security guard routine. It sounds malicious, but I’m merely being honest. Like blowing up anthills with firecrackers as a kid, tasering college students is simply the adult expression of ‘having the bigger stick’. I could lie and say I would never consider it, but the truth of it is that, with a taser in hand and a trussed-up victim at hand, I’d be sorely tested not to give it a quick zap… Just to see of course…

Of course it’s wrong, and the guards who detained him have since been suspended, Mr Meyers set free and a 100-man protest held on the campus. Regardless of what guilty pleasure I might see in such behaviour, it’s ridiculously excessive use of force when simply twisting his arm and ushering Mr Meyers out the lecture hall would work far more effectively. Indeed, I have to wonder if his expulsion was entirely necessary. He may have been loud and obnoxious on the microphone, but he probably had a good point to argue somewhere along the course of his winding rant.

Personally I would have enjoyed watching Kerry rip this guy a new intellectual A-hole, as it were, and a spirited academic debate is – at least to my mind – one of the primary purposes of a university. Whatever I may think of Kerry as a political advocate/election cry-baby, I would love to have seen a real debate between the senator and a journalism student.

Regardless of the legalities behind the incident, I find the notion of a student who gets tasered arguing against a liberal speaker quite humourous, in a tragically-depressing kind of way. There was a time not long ago where getting tasered was a right reserved solely for baby-eating, war-protesting hippies. With the tasering of Andrew Meyers, we have seen the death of a very special era in student politics, and the birth of an apolitical campus security machine. A moment of silence for this terrible situation, if you will…