I have a crazy idea: what if every adult could be issued with their own taser that can be fired only once a week, and legally use it on someone who needs to be shocked into reality?
Don’t tase me, bro. Just hear me out first.
We’ve all come across people in public being unduly irate and borderline abusive to other members of the public for the mildest of reasons, or for no good reason at all. How much more civil do you think these people would be if they could have an impromptu date with tens of thousands of volts of electricity any time they inflict on some innocent bystander their exaggerated sense of the universe having slighted them?
I don’t imagine they’d invest in public outbursts of rage so readily if some passing hero used their weekly allocation of voltage to serve as a valuable lesson in good manners.
I was prompted into this thought experiment after witnessing a young man yelling at an old lady on a train platform for a reason so puny that I can’t even recall it any longer. The moment itself was brief, thankfully, but it stuck with me until I got to work and discussed it with my colleagues. That’s when I conjured up the weekly taser blast idea.
My colleagues, all decent and upstanding people, were split between labelling it an insane idea and believing it could work (aside from a few concerns about undue risk to obnoxious people with underlying heart conditions). However, we all agreed that people would think twice about how they treat others, knowing that electric social justice could be doled out at any moment, from any direction.
