You need to make 2 telephone calls. First call your insurance agent and make sure your homeowner’s insurance policy is up to date and provides liability coverage. Second I would call my attorney and explain the situation to him or her. The law varies from state to state and no one here except a Texas tort/insurance lawyer can truly advise you, and most will not do so for free. As a general proposition, you have very little to fear since you took appropriate steps to contain and provide for the dogs, you gave specific instructions about who was to be present, and you were obviously not there to control or fail to control the dogs. Plus you had no warning that the dogs were violent in any way. I would calm down, worry about the dog in custody, and accept the apology. As for your costs, I would pay them and take my dogs to the kennel next time. If you cheaped out and had a “girl” do it, you probably got what you paid for.

All: Yes, a falling bullet is lethal. However, it only effects space going up-down. Shooting horizontally is more dangerous (although the bullet is equally lethal) because it effects the space in which people reside–low horizontal space.

Nebet: If the dog is retreating, why shoot at it? Your motivation to save the mauled person is gone and the dog is no longer a threat. What’s your reason for firing at the dog while it is hightailing it?

I have some theories of my own about our friend and his info sources. He did cite Powerline once.

“Plus ca change…” yes. I don’t know if we will ever see the end of them. Every center must, by definitions, have margins. And that right margin is incredibly persistent. I think they were slowly losing the battle for minds under the pressure of an increasingly educated populace for most of the twentieth century. It is amazing to see their resilience and spring back powers.

Couldn’t have happened without the aid and comfort given them by the mass media and the fact that very wealthy families decided to stabilize what seemed to them a chaotic social evolution and so funded an array of organizations to turn things rightward.

You get what you pay for.

The 2007 engineering article you cited indicates that “A 180 grain bullet doing 390 fps has about 60 ft-lbs of energy,” or more than enough to cause considerable head trauma. I have no idea which figures are more accurate, but I now do know why our corny friend has the ideas he does on most topics. Seems his thinking is mired in the early 1960′s when Communists and other right-wing manufactured threats were under every stone. The more things change for the Right, the more they stay the same. I eagerly look forward to the extinction of this knuckle-dragging ideology.

http://airbornecombatengineer.typepad.com/airborne_combat_engineer/2007/01/how_much_damage.html

With my faulty memory, if Google doesn’t have it, I’m in trouble. And Google doesn’t have this next memory:

I recollect that in the Vietnam war there was an aerial delivered munition that relied on terminal velocity nails or slugs to penetrate the canopies. They were employed on the strength of ground sensor data. I haven’t included them in my arguments because quite frankly I can’t remember whether they were explosively released or passively released and what the slug size was; so basically irrelevant to the discussion. FWIW

Here is the article from the Journal of Trauma cited in your article precisely supporting your position.

Ordog GJ, Dornhoffer P, Ackroyd G, et al. Spent bullets and their injuries: the result of firing weapons into the sky. J Trauma 1994;37:1003–6.

Don’t try to argue with our corny friend. Oblivious to the laws of gravity he somehow thinks bullets won’t fall hard enough to cause injury, despite the manifest fact of such things occurring. We could work out the math for him and use the concepts of bullet mass, velocity, acceleration, terminal speed, and drag caused by wind resistance but why bother. It’s like trying to teach the pig to sing, only this time it annoys me.

http://www.abc.net.au/science/k2/homework/s95523.htm

But seriously, what situation do you think guns DON’T help, because I can’t recall ever hearing you argue that there’s ever a point at which having more armed people is more dangerous than having fewer armed people.

But as a dog-lover, and gun-owner, I don’t agree that shooting attacking dogs off the attackees is the answer. Too easy to miss.

It is pretty hard to get a dog off someone that has been trained to attack or been abused.

As to conceal & carry, thank God even campuses in 8 more states are on the brink of allowing conceal & carry on the campus. Conceal & carry laws have been passed in I believe about 40 states now up from just a handful a decade ago.