From Talking Points Memo, these are the kind of questions a prosecutor would examine:
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* Why weren't they hunting in a line?
* Who was responsible for doing the guiding -- normally with these big money hunts, they pay a professional guide to take them out -- unless the Armstrong's have a gamekeeper on the property and/or didn't bother having a guide with this party, since they had hunted on the property before.
* Who taught Cheney he could shoot blind into the sun, especially at sunset? (My dad then gave me the same lecture about gun safety I've heard a billion times -- muzzle pointed away from anyone that could get hurt, no taking off the safety unless you are aware of every member of your party AND dogs, never, EVER shoot unless you are certain what is in front of you and that you have a specific target...)
* Why wasn't Cheney treated like any other American would have been -- why keep the police away from him after the incident until the next morning?
* Once a pellet gets into the cardio-vascular system, because they are tiny and lightweight, they can travel. Mr. Whittington was hit in the face, neck and chest -- a region that is fairly dense in terms of the number of arteries, veins and capillaries, many of which are close to the surface, especially in the neck.
* You have a 78 year old man, with a region that is full of blood vessels, riddled with little pieces of shot. And clearly at least one of them has gotten to his heart. Which can cause death of muscle tissue and all sorts of enzyme problems. When you have at least one shot in a multiple-pellet incident, how likely is it that this is the last time there will be a problem?
* Hunters usually wear camo jackets or other long-sleeved shirts that blend into the surrounding background. Over that, you'd wear a blaze orange vest, usually made of some medium-weight material, mainly because the lightweight ones tend to flutter in the wind. When you are hunting birds, especially quail which spook, you don't want some fluttering piece of fabric flowing out behind you.
* It seems unlikely that a shot from a 28-gauge at 30 yards when the Veep is said to have been using 7 1/2 shot would make it all the way through two layers of clothes at the end of its effective target range. So either:
(a) they were much, much closer together or
(b) the pellets are travelling, and given the estimates of pellets with which Whittington may have been hit that I've seen, that's bad news.
Updated On: 2/15/06 at 12:26 AM
