A noble, but complete waste of your time.
Those minds are already made up.
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.
We need a picture of that Monty Python scene of the peasants being shot as skeet!
>> I would have expected better from an experience hunter like Cheney.<<
I would have expected better driving from Dale Earnhart.
But what are ya gonna do? Accidents happen.
Harry Whittington made the mistake. Not Cheney....
Quite right. That about sums it up, doesn't it.
If President Bush (God forbid) ever hits someone with a golf ball while playing golf (like President Ford used to do regularly) I hope he remembers to immediatly call Terry Moran and David Gregory and admit to the attack. Get it off his chest. Come clean. If he doesn't we now know there will be hell to pay.
Better yet, Vice President Chaney should invite those two to go quail hunting with him. Two birds, one stone sort of deal.
Uh Huh, And is the chamber empty?
When hunting quail and dove, you walk them up and accidents happen. There are thousands of these type accidents every year and no law has been broken. If the press was doing it's job they would have known a day earlier. If they weren't a bunch of non-hunting pansies, they would understand what happened.
They are both old farts with guns. Accidents happen. Just like driving, hunting accidents are higher at both ends of the age spectrum, the inexperienced and old farts.
Even a lot of otherwise over-the-top libs on MSM boards I frequent don't see the hunting accident as a big deal. If anything, it should make people a bit more aware of not getting too excited while hunting and taking one's time, even if the second covey can scurry away before everyone is safely back in line.
After reading some of the comments on this thread, I thought for a moment that I had accidentally logged on to Democratic Underground. People are attacking Cheney and making excuses for Gore.
I'm not going to make excuses for Cheney. He was careless and there was an accident because of it. That does not make him an evil person. I'm sure that he realizes his mistake and will be more careful in the future.
As for Gore, he was careless too, and people are making excuses for him. "Oh, it probably wasn't loaded, blah blah blah." One of the basic rules of gun safety is to always treat every firearm as if it were loaded. The Gore love-fest is uncalled for.
To all those who made sensible comments on these issues, thank you. Your words are very much needed around some of those other comments.
He forgot to yell, "FORE!"
(Oh wait, when you're hunting, that's the other guy's responsibility).
A noble, but complete waste of your time.
Those minds are already made up.
Another attempt to silence administration critics. It's a well known fact that 35 years ago there was a disagreement between the two hunters. This "accident" is very suspicious and screams out for appointment of a special prosecution.
Look deeper and I'm sure you'll find Haliburton involvement as well.
Yeah, right. I was dove hunting with a shotgun when I was ten years old and I knew to be sure that no one or no building was downrange from where I was shooting.
Try again.
Probably Karl Rove and the Freemasons are involved as well.
;-)
sick, but really funny....LOL
Didn't Kerry shoot himself in Vietnam? Did he win a Purple heart for it?
For all we know he did check it first, and saw nothing but the quail. So what would that mean? He needs a new optical prescription, his view was obstructed by a gnat in his eye, he sneezed from the ragweed and pulled the trigger, or he's a careless old goat? Or any one of a thousand other possibilities?
Maybe the old guy Wittington was standing right beside Cheney and suddenly decided to tiptoe off and take a leak, thinking he was in the men's room at the Ritz Carlton. Or maybe he wanted to commit suicide? Who knows? Sometimes there is no 'blame'. But I think Cheney is an honorable, truthful man. If he was negligent he'll admit it and give a public apology to Wittington and the country. Until then, though, I'm assuming there were some mitigating circumstances involved. Let's wait and see.
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