Real Bats Used as Weapons

An article about a man being attacked by his girlfriend's ex-boyfriend and his friends mistakenly wrote that the victim was attacked by "baseball bats". Authorities later corrected the paper when the sheriff told reporters, "At first we thought the perpetrators used baseball bats, you know, like in sports. A lot of times people use sporting goods as weapons and such. This time the attackers actually used 5 bats, you know, like the mammals. We apologize for the misunderstanding. We just don't usually see this kind of thing -- not in Chattanooga." The bats were apparently stolen the night before from a local zoo which features a bat sanctuary.

When we interviewed the victim, he told us that his attackers tied the bats to their arms and came at him, flaunting the animals in his face. The bats apparently gave the man several bites to the face and neck. The man, gave us a short description of his hellish evening, "It was really weird. It was just getting dark. I thought that the bats were rats or something, then they just kept pushing them into my face. The guys who attacked me got bit a little too. I don't know... I guess I was actually kind of lucky that they were using bats, not bats."

The district attorney was scrambling Friday to identify the charges against the men since there are no laws which identify bats as weapons. The girlfriend told reporters that she knows enough about law to know that the weapons issue is irrelevant. "I don't know what the holdup is," she complained, "who gives a crap what weapons they used? Whether it's parakeets, raccoons or marmots, assault is assault."(See the original article)