Poland’s addiction to tasers

“The state arms itself against citizens,” headlines Dziennik Gazeta Prawna, reporting on the government plan to arm more officials including railway, forest and state fishing guards with electric stun guns. There are 400,000 policemen, custom duty officers as well as border and bodyguards with firearms in Poland but clearly this doesn’t seem to be enough. “Are we safer or, quite to the contrary, more threatened by this internal army?” wonders the Warsaw daily, stressing the fact that no other EU country has such liberal laws concerning the use of tasers as Poland. Currently, nearly 400,000 policemen, body guards, city, border and prison guards are equipped with electric stun guns. And there will be some 8,000 more when the law on firearms is amended in line with the government’s proposals. Legal experts warn that such amendments would constitute a breach of citizenship rights. “We could not confirm the presence of Great White sharks in our rivers,” DGP ironically comments - an allusion to a plan to provide State Fishing Guard wardens with tasers, pointing out that the latter “can be lethal for people with heart problems, that is some 2 million Poles”.