There’s not much I can say about Vice President Cheney’s dumb accident?<\/p>\n
Well, for starters, it’s simple; as a shooter, you own everything that goes downrange.There’s nothing else to say; yes Whittington was wrong to walk away from the shooting party without everyone going ‘guns down.’ When I’ve gone field bird shooting, I’ve gone in groups of three or four, and we were all careful to stay in line, not break a 90-degree wedge in front of us. When someone had to leave the line – usually to go answer a call of nature – we all went guns down and wait, usually mocking the absentee.<\/p>\n
But Cheney pulled the trigger.<\/p>\n
A couple of comments. The press account says that Whittington was wounded in the chest, neck, and face; assume he’s a normal sized guy, that’s about 12″ – 14″. So the minimum distance is probably 8 – 10 yards, since an improved choke patterns to about that size. I think that’s too small a distance – at that range, Whittington would have been hit by most of the load of 200 – 300 pellets. My guess is that he was probably 15 – 20 yards away; at 30 yards or more, I’d say winter clothes would have blocked the small birdshot pellets – so no wounds to the chest – so he was likely closer than that.<\/p>\n
But Cheney pulled the trigger. <\/p>\n
Having pulled the trigger, there’s just no freaking justification for the evasion of the press. It’s a recurring theme; the Administration is awesome at controlling the message; not so good at learning how to use the press to actually connect with the American people. <\/p>\n
And we’ll go right ahead and wait for the inevitable jokes about Cheney shooting a man in Texas just to see him die.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Blame Cheney.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/999"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=999"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/999\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=999"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=999"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=999"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}