I admit to having a Karl Denninger habit. The guy is nuttier than a fruitcake, but often quite entertaining. He’s also right about a few things. I once knew a man who was a brilliant mathematician. He worked for Goddard. He was also a complete wacko. A harmless wacko, but a wacko nonetheless. Denninger seems like one of those people. In a handful of narrow areas, he is very incitement. In others, the ones he talks about a lot, he is batshit crazy. Here’s one of them.

This makes for a few interesting new observations, dove-tailing with what I had previously suspected and so-stated.

First, one of the wounds in Brown’s hand was apparently caused when the cop’s gun went off in the SUV as residue was found in the wound.  That does not happen unless the gun discharges very close to where the bullet goes in.  The lack of stippling (powder burns external) is unusual but not unprecedented, and the presence of residue in the wound is solid evidence of a contact (or near-so) shot.  Further, tissue evidence was recovered from the police SUV and matches Brown.

This would appear to many to exonerate Wilson (the cop.)  Not so fast, kemosabe!

Had the fatal shot been delivered in the vehicle that would be true, but that’s not what happened.  The discharge of the firearm in the SUV, in a tightly-confined space right near the ears of both Brown and Wilson, means they were both almost-certainly temporarily deafened by the blast.  This means that Brown could almost-certainly not hear any commands given by Wilson after that, and Wilson could almost-certainly not hear anything Brown said beyond that point in the encounter either.

Maybe. I’ve been a round a lot of guns going off and you don’t go deaf. Wilson was most certainly disoriented initially. Brown, having been shot, would have been stunned, at the minimum. Of course, adrenaline pumping would have exaggerated some things, but mostly the terror of being in a life or death confrontation.

The tox report shows recent (but undifferentiated, that is, not quantified) marijuana consumption; that is, he (presumably) smoked weed some time close to the encounter, but whether he was actively high at the time cannot be discerned with any sort of reliability.

The problem remains those gunshot wounds to the head.  The round to the top of the head was recovered in the lateral right facial area with a 12cm travel path.  The other round to the head is the one that exits the jaw and re-enters the upper right chest.

The forensic findings are roughly congruent with the previous private autopsy and present the same problem in terms of physics for those two wounds.

However, there is one further finding — and that is entrance wound #5 which is unpaired.

This shot may be that which the entire situation turns on — specifically, exactly when was that shot delivered.  The problem for Wilson is that the path is not straight-on, but rather downward, implying that it did notproduce Brown falling forward (and thus providing a clean explanation for exactly how the other two shots got delivered to his head in the orientation they were, without Brown being on his knees or otherwise in a submissive posture) but rather was delivered while he was either (1) falling forward or (2) below Wilson’s plane of fire (that is, Wilson aimed downward because Brown was on his knees!)

Conspiracy nuts always fixate on one fact. That fact either unravels (allegedly) the official explanation or confirms their pet theory. In this case, Denninger is convinced the cop deliberately murdered the gentle giant. It’s popular with libertarians.

I’m no fan of the police. That’s clear, I’m sure. Further, the problems with the cops in this country are going to get a lot worse before they get better and I doubt they ever get better. That does not mean the cop was wrong or the gentle giant was murdered. The gentle giant chose to attack a cop. He tried to get the cop’s gun. After he was shot, he could have fled or surrendered by getting on his knees. He chose poorly.

In these cases, the question is about the decision tree that lead to this result. The gentle giant could have made a number of decisions that would have altered the outcome. Right up until the final confrontation, the gentle giant held his fate in his own hands. The cop’s fate was decided by the gentle giant. This criminal put him on that street in that situation. Asking that the cop, under extreme duress, to save the gentle giant from his own bad choices is unreasonable. Yeah, maybe the cop could have done something different. Maybe. Demanding that of him is simply unreasonable.

But, crazy people like Karl Denninger can never accept that.