Cheney shooting: Shotgun spray pattern at 30 yards; what victim's friends are saying
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Updated 7:04 p.m.: Transcript of Vice President Cheney's interview by Fox News
Shoot, this is serious: Corpus Christi, Texas, Caller-Times (reg.req.) photographer and avid shooter George Gongora simulates Vice President Dick Cheney's shooting of a hunting partner Saturday with a 28-gauge shotgun at 30 yards. (video) The pellets are 5mm in diameter -- about 3/16 of an inch, and Gongora emphasizes that this tight pattern is what you want when shooting quail. Nobody's laughing now that Mr. Whittington's "peppering" turns out to mean he's been shot, like a quail, and is now riddled with foreign objects which may cause infection. Dr. David Blanchard, the emergency room chief, estimated that Mr. Whittington had more than 5 but "probably less than 150 to 200" pellets lodged in his body. -- Fellow Hunter Shot by Cheney Suffers Setback, NYT According to Paul Burka at Slate, who visited Harry Whittington's law office in Austin yesterday (Full of Holes: The gossip about Cheney's bad shot), "two pellets lodged against his larynx, another was in his liver, and another migrated into the heart muscle, causing the heart attack. The pattern of wounds was between the lower chest and the forehead, a pretty tight zone for shot of 30 yards." In another Times story, Account of Doctors Raises Questions on Heart Injury), Dr. O. Wayne Isom, the chairman of heart and chest surgery at Weill Cornell Medical College, said it was unlikely that a pellet would migrate to the heart through the bloodstream, as some have assumed from the account of the Texas doctors. Burka, of Slate, finds Whittington's friends wondering how he got that injured. The official story is that the blast from the vice president's shotgun hit Whittington at a distance of 30 yards. Hunters at the Vaughn Building are skeptical. The hunt took place on a cold, windy afternoon. Whittington and his fellow hunters were probably wearing warm clothing—say, a jacket and a flannel shirt. Cheney was using a 28-gauge shotgun, a smaller-diameter firearm with pellets smaller than BBs. Whittington's friends question whether the pellets could have penetrated his layers of clothing and skin at that range. While Gongora's demonstration indicates a pattern on paper, he doesn't address whether the low-velocity pellets that puncture paper at that distance could also penetrate clothing, skin and muscle all the way into the heart. Routine first-responder information that accompanies most shooting stories is missing in this case because there was no 911 call. From the Washington Post timeline of events:
A long line of famous people -- from St. Jerome and Thomas Aquinas to Shakespeare and Shelley -- are said to have a kept a skull on their desks as a reminder of their mortality. Dick Cheney is trailed everywhere by an ambulance, waiting for him, his own personal vulture always in sight. 
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Maybe someone who was actually there will come foreward with information on what happened, but do not look to the Vice President or His staff to do so, a mistake was made on the shooters (the VP) behalf and He is not the type of person to admit to making one, a mistake that is........until inside info is available the rest of the news about what happened is anyones's best guess or hearsay.
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It was an accident, pure and simple. I am sure that the VP feels terrible to have shot a friend. The democrats and their surrogate media friends are just trying to make hay out of it. What a pathetic mess our political system has turned into. All our elective officials care about is demonizing the opposition (both parties are guilty as well as the media.) The media just feeds on the problem. Term limits are the answer. The ordinary citizen is the victim. We have a bunch of bafoons in the house and senate. All they care about is winning elections. The political process has become the end and the means to power. WE THE PEOPLE has been lost in the frenzy.
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