>Any intentional physical touch can be considered a form of assault in New York. Even if the offense doesn't have the word "assault" in it.

In your argument, "can" is doing a lot of lifting here. Sure it's 100% correct in a logician's pedantic sense, after all "can" doesn't imply it "must". It's not hard to conceive scenarios of intentional physical touch that must be considered assault which would validate the "can" assertion.

But that's not a gotcha, because that doesn't contradict with anything I wrote. I didn't claim the statement was incorrect. I called it a "bad example" and added more context to it because on its own that statement is misleading in this context.

My clarification that in NY they are "not automatically assault" is still 100% correct and adds relevant context.

So your point is not only pedantic itself, it tries to be obtuse and redirect away from the stink that those those examples are misleading.

Public debate doesn't benefit much from out-of-context statements that are misleading, even if those out-of-context statements are 100% correct in a pedantic sense.