Annachie wrote:Firstly, I'm slightly disapointed that Fly doesn't have 4 first names with 2 hyphens and finishes with "the third" ;p
What is the Elmer Fudd defence? I keep getting mixed results from google.
Elmer Fudd is a cartoon character who hunts Buggs Bunny, Daffy Duck and Tazz the Tasmanian Devil with his trusty shotgun. The repeated scenes of these cartoon characters surviving being shot with minimal injury has conditioned many more ignorant Americans (those who dont hunt or own guns) into believing that a shotgun is not a deadly weapon.
Even when loaded with light birdshot, a shotgun can be extremely lethal even at moderate range. Just ask the guy who was accidentally shot by VP Dick Cheney at arange of about 40 yards to describe requiring an emergency angiogram to remove one of the tiny pellets from his heart.
When loaded with 00 buckshot, a standard 12 gauge shotgun fires the ballistic and wounding equivalent of 9 projectiles from an AR-15. A load from a 12 gauge 3&1/2 inch magnum fires 18 such pellets. Muzzle velocity is greater than the impact velocity of the bullets that killed some 50 people in the Los Vegas Mandalay Bay hotel concert massacre. Buckshot can be lethal at well over 100 yards.
When loaded with slugs, a 12 gauge shotgun fires a projectile of nearly the same mass as a bullet from an M-2, .50 caliber machinegun that has about double the wounding capacity. Shotgun slugs will literally take limbs off. Go Google "shotgun wound head" to peruse images of people's craniums that have literally exploded.
The observations of my son and his friend was that two, singular projectiles that had been fired from a range of about 100 meters impacted about 3 meters from where they were standing. Since there was moderately dense, interveing brush, the only plausible ammunition was one of the many types of slugs on the market. Since the tenant had been firing based on sound rather than sight, the only plausible implication was that he was intending to kill.
I became aware of this last detail shortly before deposition. Given my expertise on firearms combined with the recent experience of having to attend a parole board hearing for the criminal who had murdered my brother 30 years ago, I was enraged. (Just FYI, the weapon used to kill my brother was a Dodge van that the killer intentionally ran him down with. It was in a sense a precursor to the mass murder terrorist attack in Nice France. My brother died from a "flail chest injury." During trial the paramedics testified that the injuries were so horrific that they were actually able to watch my brother's heart stop beating as their efforts to keep him alive failed. I was the family member who identified his body.) I confess that listening to the tenant's attorney ask "lets talk about your brother's murder" in his snide, condenscending nasty bitch voice nearly provoked me into avulsing his head.
During the criminal trial, the defense attorney put my tenant's marijunna bootleeging grandson on the witness stand and presented him as a "firearms expert". The source of his alleged expertise was being in the USMC before being discharged because of a brain injury then working in a gun shop before being fired because some 100 AR-15 rifles had been stolen. This imbecile testified that my tenant could not have been firing lethal buckshot or slugs because he had a choke in his shotgun. "The barrel would have exploded, just like what happens when Buggs Bunny sticks a carrot into the muzzle of Elmer Fudd's shotgun."
Go read the Wikipedia article on Shotgun Slugs and the primary reference which is an article from the FBI publication, CRIME LAB DIGEST. Go buy a box of Remington Sluggers and read the notice on the label "safe to shoot through any choke."