GQ Covers Tasers and the Protector
Posted Jun 24, 2010
I almost skipped the article in GQ magazine this month (July 2010) about tasers because I consider myself a pacifist. I do however like that we as a society are becoming a little more sophisticated by building weapons that incapacitate rather than take life. And to be honest, who doesn’t get a great chuckle out of watching a rude fan get tased in the middle of professional baseball game.
As I quickly skimmed over the pages not really intending to read, it was actually one of the article’s call outs that caught my eye…mostly because it looked out of place. It was talking about a new product being offered by the company that popularized Tasers called Protector.
Now the interesting product aspects that I thought were important were the car based features. Not only will the device deactivate your teen’s phone while they are driving (no texting), but it can also send parents information about location and sudden car movements that are irregular like extreme acceleration/deceleration, swerving or weaving.
The product does sound useful, and I wish the company all the luck in selling it…sounds a bit Big Brother creepy and I am sure somewhat expensive. And if you think back to when you were a teen, it does have its defensive holes. Logically every child would have to have one of these to make it actually useful. What is going to stop your kid from sending something off limits from another kid’s phone? And that begs the question, do we want to monitor our kids 24/7, I know I don’t…
Plus I feel like I would be telling them that I didn’t trust them which most of the time can actually cause more problems. Personal experience has shown me that when you tell humans not to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, they are going to do it anyway. Ah, the paradoxes of parenting and life.
This surprisingly great article is not available online yet, but I will add the link as if/when it becomes available. In the meantime, if you don’t get GQ magazine, you may want to consider a subscription. Outside of the tips/advice on men’s grooming and higher fashion, you can count on the articles about news, politics, women, gadgets, travel and entertainment all to be pretty top notch.