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.
Who is apologizing?
I'm fat, I sleep most of the winter and I saw my shadow yesterday. Does that make me a groundhog?) YES
One of the number one rules in driving a car is not to hit anything, But my wife has hit the door of the garage twice now, and I jack kifed the trailer too tight with my pickup and bent the fender. Its called an accident and they happen.
I'm sorry, but the vast majority of hunting accideents don't just happen. They are usually the fault of either poor firearms handling or poor field safety. From what I have read, it was a disorgainzed scramble into the field after two coveys. It was stupid to flush the second covey until everyone was back in position from the first covey.
I'm hazarding a guess here, but it appears a combination of factors lead to this accident.
The guy who got shot came up behind the group just as a covey of quail was flushed, and was in tall grass, which may have partially obscured the vest.
If Mr. Cheney turned and focused on a bird, objects behind the bird would tend to disappear, because the eye is focused on the bird.
So, what I'm getting from all this is a confluence of events that ended in this mistake.
Mr. Cheney's friend being a few seconds earlier or later is probably the difference between getting shot and not getting shot.
My point is that we weren't there and it's easy to sit in judgment from a distance.
Your ad hominem only means you don't have any basis for your unsupported and downright silly comment that this man is somehow 'at fault' for being shot.
"We have a winner. Who will probably be flamed for being correct."
Not by me but, dang! Ultimately it was Cheney's fault but this is the biggest non-story I have ever seen. Next we'll be bombarded with media drivel about how Condi slammed someone's fingers in the car door or how Rumsfeld left the door open and the cat got hit by a truck.
Accidents happen to everybody.
The White House is taking tort reform way too seriously...
Thanks!
Notice no clip in the rifle. Which is a good thing because that pose is a good way to lose your head.
There seems to be a modern-day notion that accidents are always caused by negligence. In fact, it's as though the word "accident" has been redifined to mean negligence. It's probably a result of the sue-everybody-in-sight-when-there's-an-injury mentality these days.
I think the fact that the VP shot someone is less of a story than the fact that his office put out a statement saying he didn't do anything wrong. If you pull the trigger when your gun is pointed at someone you don't intend to shoot, you have done something wrong. Period.
That reminds me -- the Klintons have their own Mafia, don't they?
It is still the responsibility of the shooter to make sure no one is downfield. And from what I have read, the entire hunting party was acting in a disorganized manner. I would have expected better from an experience hunter like Cheney.
Quayle Hunting........ Democrats have shot others at this sport for years.
Hey!
As best I can remember ALGORE was stationed in a hut and not allowed outside the compound, so as not to get hurt.
He decided to take som photos of himself in case he might need tham one day kinda like Skerry did.
ALGORE is so stupid he didn't realize it would show him looking right into the barrel of the M-16.
Too Funny
Wittingham may have been in the wrong not to let the party know he had gone off the line, but the entire onus was on VP Cheney to know where everyone was at before he pulled the trigger.
Yes, this was an accident, and luckily not a tragic one, but the bottom line is the fault lays at the feet of the shooter in all instances.
That's an empty rifle in that picture.
It also appears to be partially stripped, and given what he's doing it does appear that he's in the process of stripping it down.
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