That's a stunning claim

"More women kind of have an interest in Tasers, preferred to a firearm," a gun store owner said.

That would be opinion not based on anything resembling fact. It's great that the guy is selling stuff and making a profit, and it's also good that women are looking into self defense; no qualms there.

What irks me is that this whole article is factually flawed.

Tasers don't always work, even for cops, and the advice from "safety experts" to just drop the thing after you shoot an attacker is pretty poor considering that Tasers can still be used to shock someone via contact with the front even after the single shot is deployed. So if you do happen to put an attacker on his ass with the probes, and then drop the weapon and run, there is always the possibility that he will get up and run you down. Then what? You dropped your weapon on the bad advice from an unkown source published in a local online article and are now unarmed. Well done.

What this is all boiling down to is that this shit article by an unknown journalist was not given even a passive attempt to verify defensive facts. We've come to expect this from them these days.

"If you use these and make a mistake, you're not actually killing somebody with it," Dalston said.

Uh-huh. And that is also the big downside to them. Why do all cops in the US carry a firearm, and only select few carry a Taser? Because if they make a mistake in the face of an attacker with a Taser, they might not effectively stop them with it, and must then resort to other measures.

"At least with the Taser, you have at least 60 to 90 seconds or more to actually get yourself to safety," Dalton said.

And typically when you use a firearm to stop an attacker, you have way longer than that. And more than that, you have up to 20 times more chances at stopping them too.

I'm not a Taser hater by any means, but they are not the most effective self defense tool in any way, shape, or form. My opinion is that they are a niche weapon. It just wouldn't hurt for some lowlife reporter or such to actually do their homework and point that out to their viewers from time to time, so that I don't have to.