It's guys like Vice President Dick Cheney that give all us shooters a bad name.
Avoiding military service through five separate draft deferments during the Vietnam era, Deadeye Dick never enjoyed the advantage of the professional shooting instruction the services provide.
And that was bad luck for Harry Whittington, a 78-year-old Texas attorney who had the misfortune of accompanying Cheney on a recent hunting trip. At a range of 30 yards, Whittington was felled by a blast from Cheney's trusty 28-gauge shotgun. Apparently, the vice president mistook the lanky Texan for a quail.
Who knows, maybe he thought he was hunting for Dan Quayle.
News reports said Whittington was wearing a blaze orange vest at the time of the mishap. You wear blaze orange on hunting trips so some idiot doesn't shoot you. It doesn't always work.
Court records in all 50 states contain prosecutions of hunters who have mistakenly shot other hunters. My own cousin shot a fella by accident once during turkey season down in Pennsylvania. That was a long time ago and I don't believe he's picked up a gun since.
Liberals, by definition, are supposed to be anti-gun. Not me. I've been around guns since I was a little boy -- thanks, Grandpa -- learned the art of long-range rifle shooting in the U.S. Army, have written articles for firearms magazines, resigned from the National Rifle Association over politics, and am a member in good standing of the LaSalle Sportsmen's Club.
I've punched paper and fired on live targets. Thousands of rounds. And, in the past 40 years, I've had a gun go off accidentally exactly three times. Two were definitely my fault, while the third resulted from a mechanical defect in the gun I was carrying.
Fortunately, no one was injured in any of these incidents. One generally tries to keep the muzzle of any gun pointed away from people. But all three of those accidents are seared into my brain as though by branding iron. I can tell you who was there, what the weather was like and what, exactly, happened. They are a source of shame and self-doubt. Something you remember in order that it not happen again.
Dick Cheney takes a little bit of a different approach, though. While he shot Whittington on Saturday, there was no official word for nearly 24 hours, after a Texas reporter covering the hospital admissions beat got wind of it and put it in the newspaper. President Bush and others at the White House were informed, of course, but Cheney, it seems, has enough juice with Texas law enforcement to persuade them not to release a report on the shooting.
When you think about it, it's sort of like how the administration handled reports of its bungling intelligence prior to Sept. 11, its failure to find any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, its outing of an undercover CIA agent to the media or its illegal program to spy on American citizens.
Just pretend it didn't happen until someone finds out about it. Then try lying.
President Bush keeps Saddam Hussein's pistol in the Oval Office as a souvenir, taking it out occasionally to play with it or show visitors. We can only hope someone's had sense enough to hide the bullets.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | Feb. 14 2006 |