Prosecutor: Man held in wounding of two officers at Ferguson may have been shooting at someone else

[greyl]

11. You're assuming the bullets hit their intended target.

This situation(and the conclusions people have been jumping to) reminds me of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy:

The Texas sharpshooter fallacy is using the same data to both construct and test a hypothesis. Its name comes from a parable where a Texan fires his gun at the side of a barn, then paints a target around the bullet holes and claims to be a sharpshooter. A hypothesis must be constructed before data is collected based on that hypothesis. If one data set is used to construct a hypothesis, then a new data set must be generated (ideally, in a different way, based on predictions made by the hypothesis) to test it.

Much of young earth creationism relies on this form of post hoc reasoning. This is most clearly demonstrated in fundamentalist Christians' discussions of how the flood created geologic structures. Their ideas rely on finding data and constructing a hypothesis around that data, with no further testing of these ideas after this construction. This is a clear example of this particular fallacy.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Texas_sharpshooter_fallacy