Why Die When You Can Leave?

Two years ago, just after our beloved Vice President shot a fellow quail hunter in the face, I found myself explaining to a couple of non-hunting friends just how such a thing could occur. Quail hunting, I said, is a sport in which things happen very quickly and often don’t go the way you expect. I told them that quail often fly toward you, or between shooters, or that dogs jump at the birds, and that all things considered, in 40 years of hunting quail, I’d probably held off firing as many times as I’d shot.

I’ve also walked off hunts and away from shoots where I thought the participants might blow my head off. Many years ago, at a shoot put on for gun writers by what was then a major firearms maker, the genius running the affair put a brand-new shooter in the number one spot on a trap squad with four very experienced shooters. I was in the number two spot. A fast trap squad can unhinge some people, and it unhinged this guy. He put a shot into the ground right in front of me; a foot closer and I would have had no foot.

I didn’t yell at him but I did yell at some length at the guy who put him there and then I walked off the squad. I’ve also walked off a quail hunt in Texas, and off a whitetail drive on a cottonwood island in Montana, and off a nilgai hunt in Texas after the hunter behind me sent a rifle bullet past my head.

If you would like to see the kind of stuff you should walk away from, take a look at this video clip. Despite its intent, it ain’t funny. These clowns could have shot themselves or someone else. I would not stay within a mile of morons like these.