You'll Shoot Your Eye Out

….or maybe somebody else’s.

Back when I was a freshman in college, one quarter I took a class in rifle marksmanship to satisfy a PE requirement for my degree. For a variety of reasons, I signed up for the class offered through the ROTC department rather than the class offered through the PE department. Rifle marksmanship was actually sort of a big deal on campus; there was a rifle team, which had won several NCAA championships.

That quarter represents the sum total of my experience with guns. I had never shot a gun of any kind before, and have never since. In the words of the Army sergeant who taught the class, I became a “paper killer” for that one quarter, and by the end of the quarter, had qualified as an Army marksman.

There are only two things I really remember from the class, and the first leads to the second. The first day we actually went to the range and shot our rifles for the first time, I accidentally shot the ceiling. Fortunately, it was only the ceiling, but I was careless with the rifle and had my finger on the trigger when trying to adjust my position. Hence, the second thing I remembered, drilled into me by that Army sergeant: I was responsible at all times for my rifle and where it was pointing and what it was pointing at.

So, the attempts to place the blame on Mr. Whittington for getting in the way of Vice President Cheney’s shotgun blast don’t work for me. No matter what proper hunting etiquette says, and I’ll admit to being no authority on that topic, the fact remains: if you have a gun in your hands, you are responsible at all times for it.