However, what is the evidence that this idiocy of the plaintiff's attorney is making the slightest difference in his client's favor and against this woman?
That is the point: not whether a moronic and ethically-garbage-pail attorney might try it, but whether it matters a lick. Or whether indeed the attorney may look such an ass in this attempt as to damage his credibility. (He certainly would damage his credibility with many intelligent people if he were to harp on this.)
I would tend to say that any jury that is so hopelessly stupid and anti-gun as to decide that whether a gun was a 357 Magnum instead of a 38 Special had important relevance to whether a shooting was justified or not, is so hopelessly stupid and anti-gun that it's extremely unlikely one isn't cooked anyway.
I would suggest subtracting the articles of one particular gun writer from this equation: you know, the one who bases most of his career on alleging this particular line, with 5 alleged cases per month with potentially-verifying details seemingly always made nameless/placeless etc, and I don't know of any examples where people have found them, the disasters of being convicted because of having an ill-named gun and so forth. And I do know of an extended effort by him that was found massively fabricated, the account of the Miami FBI shooting. Anyway if the argument is true, there can't be just one man in the nation that has the evidence for it. So let's subtract that one individual's endless claims on that, and what do we have then?
Not to say that I don't think there's some merit to the concept: if a case is marginal, and totally aside from this detail there's a reasonably arguable case for real reasons that you might have been kind of happy about the idea of going and shooting people rather than finding it a last and unfortunate resort, actual evidence that you were out looking for trouble etc, then the gun having COMBAT in giant letters on the side probably does not help. However, going to the extreme with this idea seems completely unsupported (unless buying everything that this one writer says.) And besides, I would strongly strongly suggest there not being this appearance or actuality of that anyway. That is much more important than the model or brand name, IMO, in terms of how I figure how others think, including how liberals think.
I think it would be very valid to ask oneself, Why did I choose this gun for self-defense in this instance?
If the answer is "Because I am a mall ninja type and I needed to be tacticool and I wanted to be able to fire 14 rounds of my Blitz-Action-Trauma bullets in 4.5 seconds and do a tacticool reload and shoot 14 more at him, while training my Picatinny-rail-mounted laser on his forehead" and that's the only honest answer you could give, well then maybe you ought to consider something that looks obviously like a hunting or target gun that you had to press into this unexpected service, so the jury might be less likely to catch on that in fact you were itching to shoot someone.
On the other hand if that's not even close to right and the answer is because if your life is threatened you don't want a gun that fails to operate, you know this one to be reliable and here is the evidence, you personally shoot well with it and you think that's important because missed shots endanger other people and fail to do anything to protect your life, and this truly is how you think, personally I think an attorney will make a fool of himself trying to hinge his case that your gun says "Tactical" on the side. Opinions can vary, but that's mine.
