Posted on 02/13/2006 10:38:19 AM PST by SirLinksalot
How Did Dick Cheney Break the No.1 Rule of Hunting?
For veteran sportsmen like the vice president, safety is a core value
By TIMOTHY J. BURGER/WASHINGTON
The cardinal rule of hunting could not be more simple: Don’t shoot the people (or the dogs). If there’s anyone in Washington who knows this, one would have thought it would be Vice President Dick Cheney, who accidentally shot his friend and fellow hunter Harry Whittington, 78, late Saturday afternoon. Whittington is expected to recover from his injuries, but the question will linger on: how does an accident like this happen among hunters with so much experience?
For years, Cheney's take-charge public image has been bolstered by photos of him fly fishing in Wyoming and stories about Cheney jetting into hunting hotspots for quail, pheasant and other game. While serving as a congressman from Wyoming — before President Bush’s father tapped him for secretary of defense in 1989 — Cheney was a solid ally of the National Rifle Association, the staunch defender of gun rights, which also preaches gun safety.
Cheney frequently hunts ducks in Arkansas, Texas and South Dakota. His hunting career had been relatively smooth until controversy arose after he was reported to have taken conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia hunting in Louisiana in 2004, just after the Court had agreed to hear a case involving the secrecy of documents related to the Vice President’s 2001 work heading an energy task force. (Cheney was in favor of keeping them secret.)
Cheney also drew attention for reportedly shooting ducks and some 70 pen-raised pheasants at the exclusive Rolling Rock Club in southwestern Pennsylvania in December 2003. Experts were quoted at the time as saying there’s nothing wrong, legally at least, with blasting away at stocked birds. But depending on how and when they are released, it should not be confused with actual hunting, since disoriented birds placed in the field or released in front of the shooters are often neither as wary or elusive as wild quarry.
An eyewitness account reported by the Associated Press suggests that Cheney may have, in the heat of the moment, violated the No. 1 rule of hunting by failing to keep track of his hunting buddies at all times. The AP quoted the ranch's owner saying that Cheney could easily have failed to see Whittington, as the latter walked up behind the Vice President from lower ground and in tall grass. To be sure, safety should be paramount for everyone in a hunting party and some responsibility would have fallen to Whittington to make sure his fellow hunters knew he might be just out of sight behind them. But for the shooter, hunting safety dictates that focusing on the target should never be more important than keeping in mind what's behind it.
Accidents can happen, of course, in a single careless moment. Quail, when you find them and they flush, don’t exactly follow gun-safety rules. They fly up suddenly and may go in any direction. And the first thing that happens to the hunter is the adrenaline rush. That’s why quail hunters wear orange, as Cheney's group reportedly were. And that’s why experts counsel the hunter not to sweep the shotgun around and fire if they don’t know what’s in the line of fire. Knowing what's behind the target is also a rule with which, one can bet, Cheney’s Secret Service detail would have wanted Whittington himself to be intimate.
What probably spared Whittington more critical injury was the tiny size of birdshot being used on the hunt; quail are typically hunted with No. 8 shot, which is even smaller than BBs. After the accident, Whittington's face "looks like chicken pox, kind of. He's so lucky, it's a miracle," Whittington's daughter Sally told the Dallas Morning News. Cheney visited Whittington in the hospital the next day. The vice president "feels so bad," said Sally Whittington. "He's a very accomplished hunter. He was obviously relieved to see how well my father was doing."
If Cheney now finds himself criticized or lampooned, he'll ironically be in the same position he himself put Senator John Kerry in during the final days of the 2004 Presidential campaign, though the circumstances then did not involve a potentially deadly accident. At the time, Cheney used his widely-known experience as a hunter to mock a duck-hunting foray in Ohio in which Senator John Kerry ended up shooting a goose. "The senator who gets a grade of 'F' from the National Rifle Association went hunting this morning," Cheney reportedly said, to hoots. "I understand he bought a new camouflage jacket for the occasion, which did make me wonder how regularly he does go goose hunting.” As the Texas incident shows, experience does not make hunters immune to accidents, which is why hunting advocacy groups put such a relentless focus on safety as the top priority.
Bingo! When pheasant hunting with a friend, the dog flushed the bird, I focussed and sighted the bird, it flew over my friend, and I swung my gun high and did not fire. I talked to Ron later about this, and he said that this is not an uncommon situation. He's been shot twice in SD. He's an AVID bird hunter.
The left would add:
#4. Don't shoot.
Cheney didn't - the guy who got hit is the one who broke the rule!
Of course you realize, it's STILL safer to go hunting with Dick Cheney than it is to go driving with Ted Kennedy!
(Thanks to Howie Carr for that one)
Well, at least he had the select-fire lever on semi-auto. :)
It requires prior agreed-upon modified rules
Welcome abroad!
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Of course you realize, it's STILL safer to go hunting with Dick Cheney than it is to go driving with Ted Kennedy!
(Thanks to Howie Carr for that one)
AND: More people have been killed by Ted Kennedy's Oldsmobile than Dick Cheney's shotgun.
I believe that when you hunt with a group you are assigned areas where you to be. If you stray out of your assigned area you're bound to get dinged.
What I want to know is what was the SS doing. Where they taking a smoke break instead of keeping a close eye on who was where with a weapon?
At least a 'Tally Ho!' would seem appropriate...
This is not a rifle range situation with a rangmaster. Ever been in the field? Ever heard of troops being hit by friendlies? Why do people get in traffic accidents? Some people are too pompous beyond belief.
Your Daddy was correct!
Took me a few bear paw smacks upside of my head and a few more ... "you're a mutton head!" ... before mine started to develop.
God, I love and miss that man!
"From below me, to my left, some guy with dog poop for brains actually let go with a full auto M16."
What an arse. I don't deer hunt for that reason, and actually wear my Army-liberated flak jacket when on my own property some times during deer season. (Poachers, in addition to being theives, are idiots.)
Although I admit shooting feral pigs from my pickup with an AR-15 and a cruddy Romanian AK-47 (semi-auto) clone --- huge problem animal for ranchers. I've probably taken 10 shoots when shooting w/out glasses.
There's no excuse for this at all.
This was a canned hunt, not combat.
Most of the time, people get in traffic accidents because they do something wrong. The accident where both parties are paying attention and following the rules of the road is the exception.
If someone shoots another person with #8 birdshot in a field, the shooter did something wrong. Period. For you to contend otherwise is to send a dangerous message to young outdoor sportsmen.
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