Nothing designed to zap a human body with 50,000 volts of electricity should be handled with any less care than the firearms they are aggressively promoted as an alternative to for police officers facing violent miscreants.

Chances are, however, that you would much rather find yourself on the receiving end of a shock from the well-marketed stun gun than, say, a slug from a police officer's service revolver, or even a whack up the side of the head with his nightstick.

So Salt Lake City Mayor Rocky Anderson has made a reasonable call with his new policy that will equip the city's 140 patrol officers with the "nonlethal" weapons, while setting strict guidelines and training requirements for their use.

Most important of all is the fact that the Salt Lake City Police Civilian Review Board will keep an eye on the city's experience, so that any patterns of abuse or error can be corrected.

People whose job it is to watch such things have compiled a list of 148 people who have died following incidents in which police officers administered Taser shocks. Because most of those victims were under the influence of illegal drugs or had other medical problems, it probably is not fair to say that they were killed by Taser use.

But, in several of the cases examined by the ACLU and others [http://aclunc.org/police/051006-taser report.pdf] it becomes clear that they might have been killed by Taser abuse - as in the California case of a 21-year-old man who died after being zapped 17 times within three minutes.

Anderson's policy is designed to avoid such an abomination by declaring that Tasers are to be used in cases when a "dangerous or violent subject aggressively resists or attempts to flee," not just when an officer takes offense at someone's attitude. And, most importantly, that standard has to be met for each individual jolt from the Taser, not just the first one.

The mayor's rules are less rigid than those favored by the ACLU, which would allow Taser use only in cases where an officer would be justified in gunning someone down. Such a policy would have drawn no criticism from this quarter.

But Anderson's restrictions, and requirement that every officer with a Taser receive annual recertification, allows the use of these potentially life-saving gadgets with the honest realization that they can also be life-ending ones.