One Company Supplies Tasers to Virtually Every Police Department in the U.S.

When a U.S. police officer uses a Taser weapon, it's almost guaranteed to be a product of the Scottsdale, Arizona-based company Taser International. That might seem obvious. But Taser's dominance wasn't always a foregone conclusion, according to the filmmaker Nick Berardini.

In the new documentary Killing Them Safely, Berardini argues that Tasers—the stun–gun-like weapons known as electronic control devices or ECDs, which can shoot 50,000 volts of electricity up to 30 feet—are clearly capable of killing in some circumstances. He also argues that Taser International's executives created a booming business by marketing them to police departments as non-lethal weapons that were incapable of causing significant injury.