People get shot accidentally every day. In fact, according to John Lott, author of "More Guns, Less Crime," there are about 1,300 accidental shootings per year. Most of these shootings go unreported, and that was the case recently for Vice President Dick Cheney.
On Saturday, Cheney was hunting and accidentally shot one of his fellow hunters while aiming for quail. Harry Whittington, the gunshot victim, came up behind Cheney without announcing his presence. The quail took flight and Cheney peppered Whittington while attempting to hit the birds.
Unfortunate as this accident is, it is simply an accident. We all have accidents on a regular basis, and there is no reason we should condemn one another for these unlucky events. However, blame could be distributed referencing the actions taken after the incident.
According to a Monday Reuters article, President George W. Bush and the White House knew about the accident but did not disclose the information to the public. Actually, the first source to report the incident was a local newspaper - the Corpus Christi Caller-Times. The local newspaper ran the story on its Web site.
Why wasn't the public informed when one of our most important leaders was involved in a shooting - even though it was accidental? In most cases, the story could have waited until press time because it wouldn't have concerned such an important person. In this case, though, the White House, Bush and Cheney all had a responsibility to let the public know about the incident.
It seems to me that those involved didn't make the information public because they believed it would portray the leaders of our country in a bad light. In reality, there might have been a better reason for the delay, but no answers seem to be forthcoming.
The only viable reason the White House has given so far for not releasing the information is that it wanted to make sure Whittington received proper medical attention and the facts of the story were correct. In my view, the White House might as well have said it didn't release the information because it wanted to make sure that the story was bulletproof, so Cheney could get away without punishment, and Whittington was used as an excuse to buy time. I'm not saying it was a cover up, but it certainly isn't beyond the realm of possibilities.
The lesson here is that the leaders of this country are in their positions because they are supposedly capable of making the right decisions most - if not all - of the time. No one expects them to make the right decisions constantly, but ideally the majority of their decisions should be correct.
Consider people's forgiveness when there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. There could have been an outcry from the public, but in reality, we all hope the president made the best decision with the information he was given.
This certainly wasn't the case when Cheney shot - albeit accidentally - another man when they were quail hunting. We can, out of the goodness of our hearts, chalk it up as a mistake that the influential leaders of the country can learn from. The question that arises, though, is just how many more mistakes we're willing to allow within this administration.
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