This diary is more than redundant. Between the FP story, a dozen diaries and, probably, 30 comments of my own, all of the details outlined herein have already been published here.
But, for those who now face the endless, inevitable "what abouts?" I thought it might be of some value to summarize a few basic facts regarding Rep. Cantor's claims of yesterday.
First, what Cantor actually said,
Just recently I have been directly threatened. A bullet was shot through the window of my campaign office in Richmond this week.
is strictly true. Kind of. It would be more accurate to say that a bullet "fell" through the window, but the congressman is correct that the bullet was shot from a gun.
From the statement by Richmond police on the incident:
"A preliminary investigation shows that a bullet was fired into the air and struck the window in a downward direction, landing on the floor about a foot from the window," the police statement says. "The round struck with enough force to break the windowpane but did not penetrate the window blinds."
While the idea that a bullet could break a window but bounce off the venetian blinds behind it may seem crazy, it helps to understand that, on its return trip to earth after being fired in the air, the round would be going very slowly. A high-powered rifle spits out a round at around 2,000 feet per second, but a falling bullet, slowed by the air, is only going 1/10th that speed, call it 150 miles per hour for the sake of a round number.
This is not to say falling bullets are harmless. New Years Eve 1994, a tourist visiting our city from Massachusetts was killed by a falling bullet fired, say police, from as far away as two miles.
Which brings us to the second fact about falling bullets: they can't be aimed. Shots fired into the air from handguns can travel up to a half a mile away, rifles even farther. At the relatively slow speeds of their return trips, their courses are subject to variables such as wind and temperature changes.
Get it? You simply can't fire a bullet up and predict where it's going to come down. You can't. I can't. Annie Oakely couldn't. Lee Harvey Oswald, even had he been the great marksman the Warren Commission claimed, couldn't. It is physically impossible.
I don't know anything about the emails Rep. Cantor has claimed to have received or any other harassment he might have suffered, but the bullet which broke the window in his Richmond office was not, in any universe governed by the same physical laws as ours, shot at that office.
In fact, Rep. Cantor could have used the incident as a teaching moment to educate the public on the dangers of firing guns into the air, explaining that there's no telling where the rounds will land. That he tried to use the event for different purposes is another diary.
All of this, as I say, has been addressed here already, but I wanted those who are going to have to put up with equivalence-crazed yammerheads this week to have the facts ready.