[fabsroman]

Petey,

I am not trying to analyze it, because I have no idea what the facts are. However, I know accidents happen and that is why they are called accidents. They happen with guns and they happen with cars, both of which can be deadly, and that is even with all the rules in place.

Personally, I think there would be a lot less car accidents if EVERYBODY obeyed the speed limit (and I don't mean by doing 10 mph over it), stopped at stop signs, and did not try to beat amber lights by accelerating. Have you, or anybody you know, ever been at fault in an auto accident?

As far as hunting goes, accidents do happen even when all the rules are followed. I have made a couple of mistakes in my time. One time, I was dove hunting. I just got to the farm and intended on hunting a standing corn field that was about 200 yards long and 80 yards wide. I started walking down one of its lengths and my brother started walking down the other length, figuring that we would set up on each side and watch each others back. Well, a dove flushed from the edge of the field and headed over the corn, but quartering away from me. I figured there was no way my brother could be that far in front of me, so I shot the bird. Little did I know that my uncle was hunting the field also. He was further up and I ended up shooting the leaves out of the tree above him. When my brother finally got to where my uncle was, my uncle asked him who was shooting on the other side of the field. Of course, my brother told him it was me and he could not believe it was me because I am the most safety conscious person and he figured I would never shoot that close to him. Problem was that I didn't even know he was there.

On another occassion, and idiot was still hunting with a bow during firearms season and he was wearing a ghillie suit that looked really good. After being on stand for several hours, probably around 5 hours, I saw a bush moving about 100 yards away. Back then, I was too poor to afford binos, so I brought the scope up to check it out. It took me a couple of minutes to find the orange fletching on his arrows before I finally figured it out. Meantime, the only thing that prevented his death was the mechanics of the gun, but if for any reason the hammer had come down on that gun, he would have been dead. Who is to blame on that one? I didn't follow the rule of not pointing my gun at anything I do not want to kill and he didn't follow the rule of wearing orange during firearms season. On top of that, he didn't have permission to hunt the farm.

Accidents will always happen, and it is easy to condemn somebody without knowing all the facts.

Yeah, my first impression was that the antis would be all over this, but then I thought that I am glad that we have a President and Vice President that hunt. I knew that Bush liked to hunt, but I didn't know that Cheney loved to hunt. I was glad to hear that news.

As far as the warning on the upland bird stamps is concerned, the Texas DNR had been giving warnings to everybody this year about the stamp because the law was just changed 5 months ago to require the stamp. The DNR treated Cheney and the rest of the group just as they would have treated any other hunter that did not have the stamp. Cheney's camp sent in the $7 for the stamp as soon as he got back.

Accidents happen eveyday, this one just made the news because it was the Vice President of the United States.