A hunter at the Washington Post

[nancylebov]

Here's an article which goes into the sort of detail I wanted to see about Cheney's hunting accident. If I've got this straight, it's a very easy sort of error to make, but one should *not* turn and shoot because there's a real chance one will not react quickly enough if one now has a member of one's party in the line of fire.

The writer of the column finishes by saying that it's a specifically male combination of traits which can lead to that error, but there are women who hunt and I bet that they're also at risk for getting caught up in the pleasure of following a target perfectly.

Comments

[madfilkentist]

Now that's what writing should be: Focusing on what happened and what went wrong, letting neither blame nor excuses get in the way of that focus.

[janetmk.livejournal.com]

I agree it's a good piece. The writer usually writes movie reviews (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2005/03/25/LI2005032500648.html) for the Post.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Datapoint: I totally recognised his description of how being in that groove feels from playing computer games. Though you can't hurt bystanders in computer games, fortunately.

[bradhicks.livejournal.com]

Yeah, this is another story I'm not jumping on until I know more. Because I'm from a state, and from a social class, where enough people hunt that I know tons of people, personally, who've almost had that exact same accident.

That being said, it's not the shooting itself that interests me, but I'm waiting eagerly to hear clearer answers to the question of where the Secret Service thought they had the authority to not let local law enforcement get the routine interview that everybody has to do after a firearms accident from the Vice President, and why the President himself apparently had to hear about it a day later from a reporter who heard it from a bystander. From the description of the accident, I don't see any evidence that this is anything other than an entirely plausible, faintly sad but easy to make mistake. But I don't want to come to that conclusion too quickly, either, because Cheney is sure as hell acting as if he had something to hide.

[rinku.livejournal.com]

An interesting analogy I heard Virginia Postrel (a famous blogger & former editor of Reason magazine) give was this: this is similar to if he accidentally ran someone over with his car, who survived but had to be hospitalized. In both cases it shows a large lack of attention. I generally like Cheney though; he's much more articulate and mentally dexterous than Bush is (although he isn't quite as good as Condi Rice) so it's odd to see him do something that shows lack of attention.