The adage goes that you should never point a firearm at anything you wouldn’t be willing to kill.
A Dispatch review, however, found attempted murder charges were only filed in about 2% of all felonious assault cases — the majority of which involved guns.
Data from the Columbus Division of Police shows there had been 205 nonfatal shootings in Columbus this year through the first week of May, 96 of which resulted in an injury. Police had identified a suspect in 109 of those cases, according to the division’s data.
But The Dispatch’s review of the charges in those cases found only four suspects had been charged with attempted murder when the case came back from a grand jury.
So what does attempted murder really mean?
A closer look: 50 guns confiscated, 10 people shot, more than 100 gunshots detected all in 80 hours
Ohio law does not have a specific charge called attempted murder. Instead, a grand jury can indict a person under the state’s murder law with the specification that the crime was attempted, not completed.