I thank you for the lightning that shoots up and sparkles in the rain

OK so this is my last post on temporary celebrity dead ginger nutter Raoul Moat, even though he's still a trending topic on Twitter (mainly people reposting jokes at the expense of his admittedly silly name) and, unbelievably there are over 3000 people on the "RIP Raoul Moat You Legend" page.

As London Misfit points out in the comments to the last post it appears that he was tasered during the standoff, whether by Gurning Copper or someone else I guess we will never know. I heard two different accounts of said taser incident. The first one, that they zapped him after he had shot himself, seems a bit off to me. I mean the guy had just fired a shotgun at his head - it would be pretty obvious, even to the police who sometimes aren't the sharpest chisels in the toolset - that he wasn't going to be doing anything dangerous any more so hitting him with 20,000 volts seems a bit like overkill to me.

The other question, and one I'm sure will be asked over the next few weeks, is that did they zap him unsuccessfully before he shot himself and, crucially, did that cause him to shoot himself? Now from where I sit (on the outside, making generally uninformed guesses) this seems more plausible. It was pissing down and he had a lot of thick clothes on so I imagine that a taser, which to work properly has to get the little barb things to contact the skin of the target, probably got blocked by the soggy clothes and didn't take him down as desired. I'm also wondering if said soggy clothes just conducted the electricity round his body and caused a muscle spasm whilst his finger was on the trigger and blammo, instant dead Geordie.

Only not quite so instant, as he died in hospital a couple of hours later. Now I would have thought (again, with nothing to base this on apart from it seems to make sense) that a shotgun under the chin at point blank range would, when discharged, blow your head clean off your shoulders. Maybe as well as causing him to pull the trigger the taser caused him to miss a bit.

Anyway it doesn't really matter. He's dead which means my taxes aren't going to keeping him in chokey for the rest of his life which is a good thing. If it were me in charge up there instead of Margaret Beckett and Shergar's bastard love child I'd have said "first one of you with a clear shot, drop the bastard".

However one last thought. If one whackjob with a sawn-off and six cartridges can have the resources of 10% of the entire armed constabulary thrown at it, can you imagine what would happen if 20 or 50 people were to do what Moat did at the same time as a co-ordinated attack? You could destroy a country that way. For fuck's sake nobody tell the mussies.