RCMP TASER™ 82 year old man in hospital bed

Three Kamloops RCMP officers say they "really had no other choice" but to TASER™ an 82 year old man lying on his back in a hospital bed three times in the torso. The patient was delirious from lack of oxygen and wielding a 3" pocketknife.
As Cpl. Scott Wilson explained, he had "a deadly weapon in his hand".

What, you couldn't have disarmed him with a friggin blanket? There's three of you! He's 82! He's lying on his back! He has pneumonia!
Presumably the RCMP consider the potential risk of harm from blankets to be prohibitively high when compared to TASERS™.
Cpl. Scott Wilson : "We could not deploy our … pepper spray, because we could potentially contaminate the entire hospital."

OK, so it's either the pepper spray or the TASER™ then. That's it. No "other choice". No other method of handling the situation.

"He made comments to us that the guy in the next bed might be dead," Wilson said, adding that, because the man had a knife, officers thought they could potentially be dealing with a murder."

Oh please. Know what would have made this lame bit of spin even remotely defensible? If one of the three of you had gone to check on this potential murder victim, who was sleeping soundly in the next bed.

How did police ever handle this sort of situation before there were TASERS™?

Cross-posted at Creekside