Civil Rights Movement Takes On Tasers

This is an interesting and encouraging development:

LAWRENCEVILLE, Ga. (AP) - About 200 protesters marched through this Atlanta suburb Saturday [November 12], urging police to stop using stun guns like the one that shocked an inmate who later died.

Inmate Frederick Williams, 31, died in May 2004, days after Gwinnett County deputies shocked him with a Taser, a weapon that delivers a 50,000-volt shock to immobilize people temporarily.

The march was organized by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which has documented more than 150 deaths nationwide that it attributes to Tasers.

According to its website, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (hereafter SCLC) emerged out of the burdgeoning civil rights movement in 1957 and was co-founded by Martin Luther King Jr. Inexplicably, these details and the obvious fact that the SCLC draws the majority of its support from African American communities, who are likely to be disproportionately affected by the use of tasers, aren't considered worthy of mention in the Associated Press report.