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Notes -
... this article is written with similar quality and accuracy as a South Park joke. Compare:
[several paragraphs later...]
Contrast:
Well, that's just a one-off, and it's not technically a lie (and they could argue that this 'must' have been sourced from Ruesch's testimony... if they actually reported it, and found more than a couple pieces of profanity from the nurse they quote).
Compare:
Contrast:
And, for the money shot:
I will bet cash money that this is not the full and honest conversation, or even a remotely accurate summary. Forget the question of whether Baxley was asked Porth's hypothetical and responded like that -- you shouldn't take advice from politicians or funeral home owners, but you don't need to be a lawyer to know Porth's hypothetical is wildly illegal in Florida -- does anyone believe that it's anything other than clipping unrelated conversations, and not even presenting the full argument from the side it doesn't like?
Because if they do, I've got a bridge to sell them.
The only one that I can't find on-the-ground details that they're clearly eliding or outright misleading on is the Mathew Dugger shooting. Maybe because there's almost no coverage of the case on the open internet, maybe because their editors decided one out of three wasn't half bad. Except then it ends in:
But in addition to the actual criminal being a literal coke fiend (still illegal to carry while drugged up!) and thus unlikely to have only carried a firearm or tried to shoot someone in an argument because of the state SYG law, it's absolutely not an SYG case -- you are not required to flee before trying to prevent someone from murdering a downed innocent woman.
There's some interesting deeper things that could be said about the wider state of self-defense law (although the FBI numbers are kinda sus if you look at them too hard) and the WSJ analysis is less actual analysis and more looking at a CSV and hitting the filter until you get a chart you like. There's some fun questions about the general state of courts and prosecutions where despite an increasingly-online constant-surveillance panopticon world, we somehow manage to know less and less about these Big Things.
But this news story isn't it, and that people from WSJ to Giffords to Bloomberg can't actually make that story about self-defense shootings... well, it's not strong evidence, because these people are also incompetent liars anyway, but evidence nonetheless.
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