But that’s out of about one million high school players. It’s sad, tragic even, but everything has risks. A risk-free life is impossible and would miss the point of living.

There is such a law. It has been used. Those are admitted facts.

The only misdirection I can see in Dunetz’s post was that the news report he quoted said that the ordinance was new. (“New Municipal Ordinance in Wausau, Wisconsin.”) I’ve seen that mistake in other reports where the dateline of a source is misread or ignored or doesn’t exist. Doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be concerned about it.

This is the kind of “gotcha” law that is on the books so that it can be used selectively to prosecute people for doing something that is already illegal (assault) without having to do the heavy lifting of proving the elements of that crime — a situation ripe for discrimination, if one were of either (1) the SJW persuasion; or (2) an actual bigot.

That behavior which is obviously illegal BY THE LETTER is most often not prosecuted just encourages people to scoff at laws in general, because they never know which ones are meant “for real” and which ones are just for show.

the better parents did explain to their kids that snowballs stuffed with ice or rocks really could do serious damage, so we kids were ordered not to do that. And, of course, some kids did do that.

And in my childhood experience that meant that all the other kids in the fight would gang up, push the offender down, and pelt them hard from point blank range (sometimes with a tit-for-tat rock or ice clump inside) until they got the message and either ran off or promised not to do it again.

I will readily admit that this was not the best idea ever.

But snowballs? Really?

And who won’t have the ability to resist the government if they find the government more repressive than they expected.