Florida State Attorney Corey Seeks 60-Year Sentence for Marissa Alexander

[Vattel]

135. I would face a reckless discharge charge only if the prosecutor were an idiot.

If I can justifiably shoot at an aggressor in self-defense, then under relevantly similar circumstances I can justifiably shoot at, say, a tree as a warning shot to scare off an aggressor. There needn't be any more danger to innocent bystanders in the one case than in the other. All of the things you say about adrenaline spiking and shots possibly ricocheting, etc., apply to shooting an aggressor in self-defense no less than to shooting a warning shot in self-defense. Both have risks. But both are sometimes justified to address unjust aggression.


You say that I move the goalpost, but even in my original case (someone coming at me with a knife after announcing that he would kill me) I described a scenario in which shooting the aggressor in self-defense can be justified and so firing a warning shot in self-defense can also be justified. Probably your mistake is due to the fact that in real life most warning shots are not really a response to an actual attack, but rather are intended to discourage someone from attacking or from some other wrongdoing. In those cases there would be no self-defense justification for the warning shot and criminal charges would be likely. Maybe that is the sort of case you have been talking about all along and so we have merely been miscommunicating.