Florida’s just-signed “warning shot” law unlikely to help Marissa AlexanderPosted by Andrew Branca Tuesday, June 24, 2014 at 11:50am
It was with considerable astonishment that I read the following headline in an ABC news post:
Marissa Alexander, who fired warning shot at husband attacking her, likely won’t see prison after Florida changes ‘Stand Your Ground’ law
One wonders if they had to work extra hard to get four errors into a single headline, or if it’s just a talent. Let’s take a look at them one at a time. I guess we’ll never know, because no authorship is associated with the piece. If I’d written this post, I’d want to be anonymous, too.
Alexander “Fired Warning Shot”
The article states:
She said she raised the gun and fired a warning shot into the air to scare him off, rather than hurt him.
Really. She fired a warning shot “into the air”? Well, I suppose any time one fires a gun without being either under water or in space, one is technically firing “into the air.” The impression they are trying to create, of course, is that Alexander fired upwards into the air, that is, in a harmless direction, because she wished “to scare him off, rather than hurt him.”
It’s curious then, then the forensics photos don’t show a bullet hole in the ceiling above where Alexander was standing. Instead, the bullet hole in the room in which she fired the gun is in the wall behind where her husband and his two minor children were passing. The bullet she fired “into the air” travelled through that air horizontally, past the heads of her husband and his children, into the wall behind them, through that wall, into the next room, and finally embedded itself into the ceiling of the next room.
One of the children who took the witness stand at Alexander’s first trial testified that he thought they were going to die.
That’s some “warning shot.”
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