Vice President Dick Cheney should go back to school.
Several area hunters think Cheney could use a hunter-safety education refresher course after a bizarre incident Saturday in which the vice president shot one of his hunting partners on a quail hunt.
“He broke one of the 10 commandments of hunting,” said Westchester hunter Mike Reynolds. “The protocol is that before you pull the trigger, you make sure what the target is and beyond.”
This means knowing where your fellow hunters are at all times before firing. Cheney’s sin, Reynolds said, was being “oblivious to what was beyond the quail.”
Cheney shot a hunting partner on a 50,000-acre ranch in south Texas with a 28-gauge shotgun (at 30 yards or 30 feet, as has been variously stated). That sent Harry Whittington, 78, to the intensive-care unit of a hospital in Corpus Christi with face, chest and neck wounds.
The incident did not become public for 24 hours. Katharine Armstrong, owner of the ranch, said Whittington “got peppered pretty good. It knocked him silly.”
White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan suggested it was Whittington’s fault he was shot for not “notifying others that he was there.” However, hunters said it was Cheney’s responsibility not to pull the trigger if anyone was at risk.
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“The bird gets away,” Mike Lauer of Gurnee said. “That’s a fact of life. The onus should be on the hunter.”
Lauer, a six-year Illinois hunter-safety education instructor, said it sounded as if Whittington was lucky the traveling medical team that follows Cheney (four heart attacks) was on the scene. Even at a distance of 30 yards, with bird shot the hit would pack quite a wallop, Lauer said.
Under Illinois law, anyone born on or after Jan. 1, 1980, must complete a free hunter-safety course before obtaining a hunting license. Older hunters were grandfathered in, Lauer said, but some do sign up. It is critical to always treat a gun as if it is loaded and to always focus not only on a hunting target, but what is beyond, Lauer said.
“I cut out the articles from a couple of newspapers on this,” he said. “I use them as real-world stuff that can happen. We get people who have hunted for 40 years and they don’t think they can learn something from the class. They say, `That will never happen.’ Then it happens.”
Bob Becker, 75, of Godfrey, president of the Illinois Federation for Outdoor Resources, has hunted for 56 years and been shot with pellets from a distance.
“They hurt and they stung,” he said, “but they didn’t do any real damage. It’s so easy to happen when everybody doesn’t stay focused on where everybody is. [Cheney’s incident] is where hunter-safety education courses come to the forefront. It’s so important to the younger people, and us older people can use a reminder.”
Longtime hunters say scenarios like that of Cheney focusing in on a quail and overlooking one of his hunting partners can occur in the wild.
“I almost did that to a guy one time,” said Ron Koch, from Omro, Wis., who said the near-accident was about 25 years ago while he was pheasant hunting. “I saw him just in time. I don’t care how old you are, you can never be too careful with a gun.”
States generally have strict policies about timely reporting of hunting incidents. Any incident that results in death or serious injury from a firearm or bow and arrow must be reported to the Illinois Department of Natural Resources within five days. The form, which can be printed out from the agency’s Web site, includes a checklist of possible injuries by body part.
No one said Cheney should have been fingerprinted and booked (Secret Service agents were on the scene), but Reynolds and Lauer theorized the 24-hour silence in Texas was because everyone present wanted to get their story straight.
“They put their heads together to make him not look like an idiot,” Reynolds said.
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