board77

In defense of Iavas, Cheney has admitted to drinking some beer at lunch ... so maybe he is onto something.

Smaller gague shotguns are more powerful than larger ones. A 28-gague shotgun is pretty weak and you'd probably survive getting shot with one, even from close range. A 10-gague will cut you in half.

(of course, in both situations it also depends on what kind of ammunition is being used. But a 28-gague loaded with birdshot is a weak-weak combination).

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But a 28-gague loaded with birdshot is a weak-weak combination

Is there not one knowledgable person in the mainstream media who's questioning this??

It's a weak-weak combination that is then weakening even further over the 30 yards, and yet it still managed to penetrate the guys clothes and all the way to his heart..

Iavas_Saar wrote:

Is there not one knowledgable person in the mainstream media who's questioning this??

I think to a certain extent, people have just accepted that nothing these guys say can be taken as straight truth. People who are inclined to disbelieve them by default are just going to say, "compared with all the half-truths they've already told about more serious matters, is this really that big of a deal?"

The sad thing is that the usual republican apologists are alread blaming the media for the whole thing .... like they pulled the damn trigger ....

its insane the way people are divided on every single thing including some hunting accident

Gotta love Capitolhillblue:

Secret Service agents say Cheney was drunk when he shot lawyer

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According to those who have read the report and talked with others present at the outing, Cheney was drunk when he gunned down his friend and the day-and-a-half delay in allowing Texas law enforcement officials on the ranch where the shooting occurred gave all members of the hunting party time to sober up.

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Cheney has a long history of alcohol abuse, including two convictions of driving under the influence when he was younger. Doctors tell me that someone like Cheney, who is taking blood thinners because of his history of heart attacks, could get legally drunk now after consuming just one drink.

If Cheney was legally drunk at the time of the shooting, he could be guilty of a felony under Texas law and the shooting, ruled an accident by a compliant Kenedy County Sheriff, would be a prosecutable offense.

But we will never know for sure because the owners of the Armstrong Ranch, where the shooting occurred, barred the sheriff's department from the property on the day of the shooting and Kenedy County Sheriff Ramon Salinas III agreed to wait until the next day to send deputies in to talk to those involved.

This so sounds more feasible than the official story.

Heres an interesting, sorta relevant article that was in the local paper here. I like Gordon Dillow. He's a pretty good guy and usually, in my opinion anyways, cuts to the chase with stuff...

Media are shooting themselves in the foot

GORDON DILLOW


There was an astonishing amount of ignorance and incompetence on display in the Dick Cheney hunting accident.

No, I'm not referring to the vice president's actions. Instead, I'm talking about the ignorance of so much of the news media on the subject of firearms.

You know the story. Cheney was quail hunting in Texas over the weekend when he fired his shotgun at a bird and accidentally hit another member of the hunting party, a 78-year-old Texas lawyer – an incident that produced not only an avalanche of Cheney jokes but also lawyer jokes.

Which is all well and good. Cheney is the second-highest public figure in the land, and has to expect that sort of thing. As for the incident itself, although the details are still a little murky, my father drummed it into me from an early age that the guy holding the firearm is ultimately responsible for everything that happens with it – and so I figure the buck has to stop with the vice president.

But what has driven me and some other Orange County firearms owners to distraction is how much firearms misinformation has been bandied about on TV in connection with the shooting incident.

For example, time and again as the story broke I heard TV talking heads say the hunting partner had been hit with "buckshot" from Cheney's shotgun – which if true would have been most unfortunate for the hunting partner.

That's because buckshot, which is often used for deer-hunting – hence the name – are large round projectiles that most commonly measure 0.34 inches in diameter, a single one of which would put a pretty big hole in a lawyer, or anyone else. He was actually hit with birdshot, which are tiny pellets about the size of grains of coarse sand. They're still potentially lethal in some circumstances – but they're not buckshot.

And so on, and so on. I heard people call Cheney's shotgun a "rifle." They said Cheney was using a ".28-caliber" shotgun instead of a 28-gauge shotgun.

Yes, I know a lot of this stuff can get pretty arcane, even for some gun owners. For example, although I own several shotguns, I still had to ask my friend Chris Wayland of Costa Mesa, a National Rifle Association-certified firearms instructor and range safety officer, why we classify shotguns by gauge instead of caliber – except of course for the .410 shotgun. Chris, who is a walking firearms encyclopedia, explained that it all goes back to a 19th-century English standards commission that decided to – well, let's not get into that here.

Still, when you don't know buckshot from birdshot you probably shouldn't be spreading the ignorance by talking about it on TV. Because a lot of gun owners, myself included, believe that ignorance about firearms – among reporters, legislators and the general public – is what has prompted most of the pointless, useless, semi-hysterical "gun-control" laws that law-abiding gun owners have to contend with these days.

"This country is too far removed from the farm," says Jan Wensink, 49, a longtime NRA member from Huntington Beach. "Most people grow up in cities and have never held a firearm in their hands" – which is why, he says, they're willing to believe that certain now-banned so-called "assault weapons" are functionally different than semi-automatic hunting rifles, when actually they aren't.

In fact, Jan figures that firearm ignorance, and anti-firearm bias, are fueling the Cheney story.

"If they'd been riding motorcycles in the desert, or skiing and Cheney had hit him, this would have gotten very little play," he says. "But because it was a firearm involved they're all over it."

He may be right. On the other hand, I remember the comics having a field day when President Gerald Ford was routinely conking spectators with errant golf balls.

Meanwhile, Chris Wayland wonders if firearms ignorance in the news media is really simple ignorance, or something more sinister.

"It's hard to know what errors are from ignorance and what errors are intentional," Chris says. "But in my judgment, 90 percent of the misinformation in the press is sensationalizing, either to sell newspapers or to advance an (anti-firearm) agenda."

He could be right, too. Some of the firearms ignorance is so egregious as to seem almost willful.

But either way, I hope my news media colleagues will start providing the public with more accurate firearms information.

And that they'll stop shoveling buckshot.