Learned Hand
Posts: 214
Joined: Oct. 2009
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Keiths has Barry Arrington's number. This is exactly Arrington's modus operandi: speak with great authority (but often little thought or knowledge), and then avoid embarrassment by evading substantive responses. This can mean the banhammer, but here he's simply constructing a straw man that no one will defend. Since Keiths won't defend the argument Arrington falsely attributes to him, Arrington will declare victory and move on.
Kairosfootnote[1]: Arrington's pomposity is naturally unearned. Although he declares that "[f]iring a shot into the air is not criminal assault under the law," he is quite wrong. Criminal assault consists of a threat (verbal or implicit) to commit some unlawful harm. Firing a shot into the air is absolutely criminal assault in any instance in which (a) the action is intended to, and does, cause someone to fear that you will shoot them, and (b) you don't have the lawful right to shoot them.
Here, presumably, the defendant was convicted of assault because the jury interpreted her warning shot as a threat to commit some unlawful harm. She could, and apparently did, argue in her own defense that she was only threatening to defend herself. That could (I think, I don't know much about Florida law) make the threatened action a lawful harm, in which case the threat would not be assault. But that only works if the jury believes that she was entitled to use deadly force to defend herself. As Keiths pointed out, and Arrington misinterpreted, juries are unpredictable and very often inconsistent within jurisdictions.
I would respond as such at UD, but naturally was banned long ago for pointing out a previous instance of Arrington's strawman tactics. As Kairosfocus would say (but never to the hand that feeds him), "Do better."
[1] Onlookers, let me here point out that the above (unlinked, as there is no always-present sidebar to douse oily flames of red straw herring-men, contributing therefore to the storm of slander that is everpresent here) is not a "footnote," which Plato warned us would be abused by those who are the victim of both slander and unreasonable hyperskepticism. Instead it is a "kairosfootnote," a footnote that is (a) longer than the main text, (b) largely off-point, © uninteresting to the vast majority of onlookers, and crucially (d) carries at least one sub-footnote.
BYDAND.
Edited by Lou FCD on July 16 2013,18:01
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