Honestly it's probably a case-by-case thing, and debatable. A lot of it is down to the motives of the people involved, and I think swatting really hits on a gr

Honestly it's probably a case-by-case thing, and debatable. A lot of it is down to the motives of the people involved, and I think swatting really hits on a grey area. With any sort of "potentially lethal indirect action" like this, there are some people who genuinely do wish to kill the victim, but are scared enough of legal consequences that they're trying to hide behind an act of "plausible deniability" - they're too scared to do a cut-and-dry "this is agreed upon by society to be murder" act, and/or they want to do something where they're likely to be undetected. A lot of times they genuinely want to keep living their life, but specifically want to off this other person because they feel like their life would be better with that person out of it (i.e. the motivator behind many duels, or many poisonings of spouses, etc). The second big thing is a grey area of "quasi-lethal intent", which is as old as humanity. Perhaps the classical example of it is King David "willfully endangering" Uriel, the husband of Bethsheba, in order to get him out of the way in order to adulterously claim her as his own. It's a fuzzy motivation - did he really mean to kill him outright, or perhaps merely to cripple him, or just simply "get him out of the picture" by sending him off on a distant military campaign? He knew quite well it could end up lethal, and it did. The reality is we just don't know where the motive fell - we do know that no matter what, it was a very bad motive, that was close to being murderous; we just don't know if it was "the full monty". I think a lot of swatting and such is like that. It could be a laissez-faire "if he dies, he dies" attitude, or it could be lethal intent. Without mindreading, we can't tell the difference. Either one's pretty bad, and at the very least, I feel like the former is pretty cut-and-dry "manslaughter". I think we've got a few degrees of murder it also qualifies for - in fact, I think the description of what is often "third degree murder (aka Depraved-Heart murder)" is pretty close: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_(United_States_law) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_(United_States_law) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depraved-heart_murder https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depraved-heart_murder