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... in relation to Cheney's indiscretions and wrote this: I think back to my adolescence. When I was a teenager, my father forced me to go hunting with him on Saturday mornings (I would have been much happier spending Saturdays bowling, at the time). I didn't really enjoy hunting. At the time, although I didn't realize it, the vision in my left eye was deteriorating rapidly. I was growing much more near-sighted and being left-eyed and left-handed, that meant that I usually lost the target as I brought the shotgun up to sight. But, I'd had my gun safety course and I was expected to go along.
But, one December Saturday morning when I was fifteen, my father, my younger brother and I were hunting pheasant. I had wandered ahead of my father and brother, and out of the corner of my eye, to my left, I saw something move about twenty yards away. I rapidly swung to my left, tracked the target for not much more than an instant and fired. I barely knew what it was until I'd hit it. I'd swiveled around about 150 degrees and hit a rabbit, and missed hitting my brother by about ten or fifteen feet. I was horrified. My father was yelling at me to kill the rabbit. I'd hit it in the left flank, and he kept yelling at me to kill it, that it was suffering. Finally, he reached down and grabbed it and wrung its neck.
He didn't understand my confusion. I'd violated almost every rule of hunting. I'd gotten ahead of my party, I'd fired at a target traveling behind me without knowing where everyone else was, I'd shot at something I didn't intend to eat and I didn't make sure it a clean kill. And, I'd come close to killing my brother. The hole in the rabbit's side was about two inches around. If I'd hit my brother, he would have had a two-inch hole in him.
I never went hunting again. I realized later that day that the gun had led me, not the other way around, that it had power over me, not me over it.
I think now that's why I know what sort of person Cheney is. From the way he hunts, and the power he imagines he has.
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