Stun gun maker seeks UK cover

UNDER-FIRE stun gun maker Taser International, which has seen its shares dive after new allegations that the supposedly non-lethal weapon can kill, is blasting back at its critics using British data.

No stranger to controversy, it was the subject of a damning report last weekend in the New York Times which said that 50 people, six in June alone, had died after being shot with a Taser by law enforcement officers.

The NYT also claimed the most comprehensive report on the guns was carried out by the British Government in 2002 and concluded 'the high-power Tasers cannot be classed, in the vernacular, as 'safe'.'

The report added that Britain had not approved Tasers for general police use.

Taser's shares have been hammered this week. They closed at $40.24 before the report was published and have been trading around $31 the past couple of days. But its investors are used to a roller-coaster ride. The shares have been as high as $64.15 this year and as low as $2.12.

Taser has spent much of the week disputing the NYT report. First, it distributed a 3000-word Press release refuting the newspaper's claims and said the reporter set out to write a negative article.

Later, chief executive Rick Smith, in a conference call and in TV interviews, hotly disputed that 50 deaths could be attributed to Tasers. He said the guns were often blamed initially, but autopsies revealed other causes of death, such as a cocaine overdose.

He said there were in fact only two or three genuinely controversial cases and blasted the NYT for its reporting of the British research. He agreed there was a 2002 study when the M26 gun was new to market. But he accused the newspaper of 'selective disclosure' because it did not mention any follow-up analysis.

'In 2003, the British Government approved the advanced M26 for deployment by five agencies, including the Metropolitan Police who have been using it for over a year and have concluded the use of the Taser has invariably brought dangerous situations to safe conclusions,' he said.

'I think it is a serious omission not to mention that... and we are awaiting a final decision on national deployment,' he said.

The controversy overshadowed another quarter of growth at Taser. Revenue climbed to $16.3m (£8.9m) from $4.2m a year earlier.

Profits rose to $4.5m from $347,059.