Texas shooting: was Cheney drunk?

[newswolf56]

Speaking as someone who is and has been a firearms owner and shooter nearly all my life (former hunter, former competitive shooter, present-day recreational target shooter and maximum-accuracy handloader), let me make it emphatically clear there is absolutely no excuse -- NO EXCUSE WHATSOEVER -- for what Cheney did.

Confirming one's target (which includes making certain no one is inadvertently down range) is one of the foremost rules of shooting and hunting: the very reason that in most states, accidentally shooting another human is not only felony criminal negligence (at the very least), but grounds for automatic lifetime revocation of hunting privileges.

Thus my question -- and under the circumstances it is the ONLY question -- is whether Cheney had been drinking and indeed how much alcohol he had consumed, that his reflexes were so slowed (and his vision so blurred) he swung on a flying bird and shot a companion instead.

Which is, in fact, the only plausible explanation of what happened -- particularly since combining hunting and boozing are big time American pastimes (especially among the aristocracy), this in arrogant defiance of another prime rule of firearms safety: that gunpowder and alcohol don't mix.

Indeed, as hunting has increasingly become a sport only for the very rich -- a trend especially evident in my home state of Washington -- so has the presence of drunken hunters afield seemed to increase dramatically: an impression corroborated (though I have no statistical confirmation) by virtually every rural dweller I know.

In my younger years, such drunkenness was so rare as to be nearly unthinkable, and its alarming increase is one of several reasons most of my friends and I stopped hunting nearly a decade ago.