I'm going to go ahead in put myself in the "it's retarded but shouldn't be illegal" camp. Obviously, if you end up shooting someone random, there's got to be consequences, but in the very, very limited circumstances where a warning shot may be prudent and possible, why not?
That's where I stand on this.
The government should not have a say on whether people can or cannot do stupid things. If you do stupid things - and harm another person - then you should pay the price for that stupidity.
The fact that this is being debated in the fashion that this thread has taken shows how far down the road towards letting the government decide what our actions should be on any given moment we have gone.
Firing a warning shot? I think it's almost always stupid. - But - some people need to hear the actual sound of gunfire before their "oh shit I'm about to get shot" reflex kicks in.
If you fire that shot - and it goes up in the air and kills some girl in a parade - then your butt should go to jail for negligent homicide. If you shoot into your front lawn to get some gang bangers off your property - and it works - then you have avoided killing another person and shouldn't be prosecuted for damaging your lawn.
What we are talking about here is the government legislating the 1/2 inch movement of your finger. Not the outcome.
We have gone away from the 'no harm no foul' version of the way the law used to work in this country - to the ' if you even think about it - you are guilty ' version of the law that is now currently taking hold more and more. There are latin terms for these two ways of looking at the law - I can't remember what they are of the top of my head. But basically one is rooted in the ideas of liberty - and the other is rooted in the ideas of tyranny.
Trying to legislate that being "allowed" to fire a warning shot (either way - yes or no) - is going down the road towards a tyrannical version of the law. As soon as you say it's allowed - you are also admitting that the govt. has the right to say it will not be allowed.
This will of course depend on the whims of whichever group has the reigns of the law making machinery at any point in time. Which is why the Founding Fathers gave us a Constitutional Republic - and not a democracy as everybody seems to think these days.
The proper response of everybody who responded to this thread should have been: "it's none of the government's goddam business one way or the other".