Forget Tupperware; hit a Taser party
GILBERT, Ariz. -- Before she lets them shoot her little pink stun gun, Dana Shafman ushers her new friends to the living room sofa for a serious chat about the fears she believes they all share.
"The worst nightmare for me is, while I'm sleeping, someone coming in my home," Shafman says, drawing a few solemn nods from the gathered women.
Shafman, 34, of Phoenix, says she knows how they feel. She says she used to stash knives under her pillow for protection.
Welcome, she says, to the Taser party.
On the coffee table, Shafman spreads out Taser's C2 "personal protector" weapons the company is marketing to the public. It doesn't take long before the women are lined up in the hallway, whooping as they take turns blasting at a metallic target.
"C'mon!" she says. "Give it a shot."
Shafman isn't an employee for Scottsdale, Ariz.-based Taser International. She's an independent entrepreneur who's been selling Tasers the way her mother's generation sold plastic food-storage containers.
As a single woman who lives alone, Shafman says she's the perfect pitchwoman for Taser as it makes a renewed push to sell weapons to families.
Taser doesn't expect its dealers to start imitating Shafman, but spokesman Steve Tuttle says people can learn from her approach.
Shafman, a freelance construction consultant, says she always had a natural interest in self-defense products. She loved the idea of the Taser, which would allow her to stop an attacker from across the room without getting physical.
She tried moonlighting as a door-to-door Taser saleswoman. But years of negative press about Taser made it tough.
"Nobody wants to purchase a product that they think is lethal or going to kill somebody," she said.
A lot of people, especially women, need time to get comfortable with a product like Taser before they'll consider buying one, Shafman says. So the Taser party was born.
Shafman says she's sold about 30 guns per month at $349.99 since her first Taser party Oct. 15. She doesn't get a commission from Taser. Instead, Shafman says she gets a discounted dealer rate for the units and keeps the difference.
Taser has been surging on Wall Street two years after the Securities and Exchange Commission concluded its investigation into the company's safety claims and business practices. Its stock more than doubled in 2007, from a low of $7.44 to a high in 2007 of $19.36 a share.
Company officials say they're now selling Tasers in 43 countries and more than 12,500 police agencies in the U.S. are either using or testing their weapons. With its weapons dominant in law enforcement, Taser is turning its attention back to the civilian market. The weapons are legal in all states except New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Michigan, Wisconsin and Hawaii, and in Washington D.C.
Amnesty International, which has criticized Taser's assertion that its weapons are non-lethal, frowns on the C2 and any attempt to spread the use of stun guns. Officials with the human rights organization say the weapons are frequently used to excess by trained police, and they're likely to be abused by the public as well.
Mona Cadena, Amnesty International's Western Regional director, says there are already reports of domestic violence using Tasers and other energy weapons.
"Of course, we want to stop violence against women like Dana's saying," she says.
"But we also want to ensure that Tasers don't end up causing it, too."
Taser forces its customers to submit to a criminal background check before giving them a code to turn on their weapons.