So warning shots are reckless, but shooting people directly is not? My guess is, that there were about zero injuries because of these 49 warning shots. How many unarmed people have been shot in comparison by US police?
The logic is that if you have the opportunity to fire a warning shot, the circumstances were not severe enough to justify firing a gun at all. A woman in Florida just got 20 years in prison based in part on that principle: http://jacksonville.com/news/crime/2012-04-21/story/naacp-we...
Note that some evidence suggests she was also the initial aggressor, which likely contributed to her conviction.
This is just plain wrong. It's much, much more common for shots fired at people to hurt bystanders than warning shots fired into the air. There has only been a single recorded case ever of someone being killed by a warning shot fired into the air. While there are thousands of cases of bullets ricocheting off walls or going through them and harming civilians during shootouts.
The chance of someone being injured by a "warning shot" is essentially the proportion of the ground surface which is occupied by a person. Unless you're in a crowded area, this is very low - in fact I would think it's less likely than a bystander being struck by a horizontally-fired bullet that misses its intended target.
You are assuming that the person being shot deserves it. UK police shot about 5 people a year. I can think of at least 3 instances where this was totally unnecessary. I.e. drunk man with table leg in his backpack which was mistaken for a sawn off shot gun. Mentally ill teenager with a toy gun. Ditto but with a gun shaped lighter. All with highly trained firearms officers present. It seems highly likely to me that less well trained 'general purpose' US police officers are shooting a lot of people unnecessarily.
