Posted on 02/12/2006 12:46:46 PM PST by bayourant
Edited on 02/12/2006 2:10:43 PM PST by Admin Moderator. [history]
Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot and injured a man during a weekend quail hunting trip in Texas, his spokeswoman said Sunday.
Harry Whittington, 78, was "alert and doing fine" after Cheney sprayed him with shotgun pellets on Saturday while the two were hunting at the Armstrong Ranch in south Texas, said property owner Katharine Armstrong.
Armstrong said Whittington was mostly injured on his right side, with the pellets hitting his cheek, neck and chest, and was taken to the hospital by ambulance.
Whittington was in stable condition Sunday, said Yvonne Wheeler, spokeswoman for the Christus Spohn Health System.
Cheney's spokeswoman, Lea Anne McBride, said the vice president was with Whittington, a lawyer from Austin, Texas, and his wife at the hospital on Sunday afternoon.
Armstrong said she was watching from a car while Cheney, Whittington and another hunter got out of the vehicle to shot at a covey of quail late afternoon on Saturday.
Whittington shot a bird and went to look for it in the tall grass, while Cheney and the third hunter walked to another spot and found a second covey.
Whittington "came up from behind the vice president and the other hunter and didn't signal them or indicate to them or announce himself," Armstrong told the Associated Press in an interview.
"The vice president didn't see him," she continued. "The covey flushed and the vice president picked out a bird and was following it and shot. And by god, Harry was in the line of fire and got peppered pretty good."
The shooting was first reported by the Corpus Christi Caller-Times.
She said Whittington was bleeding but not very seriously injured, and Cheney was very apologetic.
"It broke the skin," she said. "It knocked him silly. But he was fine. He was talking. His eyes were open. It didn't get in his eyes or anything like that."
She said emergency personnel traveling with Cheney tended to Whittington, holding his face and cleaning up the blood.
"Fortunately, the vice president has got a lot of medical people around him and so they were right there and probably more cautious than we would have been," she said. "The vice president has got an ambulance on call, so the ambulance came."
Armstrong said Cheney is a longtime friend who comes to the ranch to hunt about once a year. She said Whittington is a regular, too, but she thought it was the first time the two men hunted together.
"This is something that happens from time to time. You now, I've been peppered pretty well myself," said Armstrong.
___
Associated Press writer Paul Weber in Dallas contributed to this report.
That is true lol those pellets could go for alot of money on e bay
What would the pellets go for on Ebay?
I believ it was Harry who made the mistake. He should have called out to the party when he saw they had moved away from him. Senile old geezer who wasn't paying attention to his surroundings.
Stay with your party, or put yourself at risk.
A co-worker of mine lost his eye in a very similar accident - hunting birds and got hit by a stray pellet.
LOL!
I love Truth, Facts, and FR!
Exceept his friend, or ex-friend now, is a lawyer. How dumb can you be but to shoot a lawyer and let him live.
I read that. I was just over there for the comedy. OMG they are overjoyed.
What? They're not tying this to HALIBURTON? Didn't Haliburton manufacture the pellets or something? ROFLMAO!
Rush is going to have a blast with this come Monday. :)
Time to start a new club: "Cheney's Prominent Leftist Hunting Club"
Good to see I'm not the only one who finds that image more than a tad, ahem, "obscene."
He needs to take every Senator hunting.
In Boy Scouts we called getting peppered by buckshot an "Odessa Sunburn" , referencing Odessa, Texas. We were in Midland and often derided them because of their high redneck population (or sh!t-kicker before PC took over). Funny, like Midland didn't have rednecks either, but like they said in the movie Friday Night Lights, we weren't nuthin but a bunch of rich hillbillies.
Your tagline says it all! Brilliant!!
If only Cheney had driven into a lake with a chick he was sleeping with.
"Yeah, my guess he was quail hunting with an assault weapon."
Oh, fer Pete's Sake. Every liberal KNOWS that you take some sort of Elephant Gun with you if you're hunting quail, LOL!
This will be much a-do about nothing. And meanwhile, there are still bodies buried in Fort Marcy Park. Go figure....
Sorry don't pull the trigger unless you have a clear field of fire.
ROTFLOL!
The DUhers are so ignorant, they don't even know that this would be a tort, not a crime. And they call Bush dumb?
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