Was Cheney drunk, or just old?

A Texas hunter is undecided:

Texas hunters have gradually become pretty safe, largely because each generation looks at the last and things "Damn, how did they survive that long doing what they did?" I went through this, hunting with men in their 80s who were nearly deaf back in the 1970s, holding their drink while they shot. They cast aspersions on my manliness and sexuality because I used earplugs. Remember, they were deaf, and by mid-morning, pretty drunk.

Their kids (my parents and friends their age), drank a lot less, kept a close eye on their parents (who swung loaded guns around any way they felt like, while drunk, in very small, very crowded blinds), and were usually sober until late afternoon. They would put their fingers in their ears when they weren't shooting to try to protect their hearing.

And I noticed that the close watch that they kept on their parents was very similar to close watch my friends and I would keep on them. People my age tend not to drink while hunting, or drink very little, we actually identify targets, we don't get a chuckle out of blasting a sleeping owl or other endangered species with a 12 gauge (yes, we actually avoid timber rattlers), and we have had far fewer accidents than our parents, and we certainly don't have a list of hunting-related maimings and deaths like our grandparents do (or did, as most of them have passed at this point).

So, Cheney is 65 or so. He grew up in the West, which is about 15 years behind the rest of the country (when I was dragged to Brokeback Mountain, I kept thinking that it looked a lot like Montana or Wyoming in the late 1980s in the scenes from the '60s, and I was not the only one who made the comment afterwards). Thinking of him as I would someone in their '80s now, I would just expect that he has no understanding of gun safety at all, regularly does things that would make my friends and me hit the ground and/or start shooting at him, and just wound up getting unlucky, because that is what happens when you screw around with guns without paying attention for long enough. He didn't have to be drunk, but the fact that the Secret Service kept anyone from speaking with him does suggest that he had been drinking.

Not having the license tag was just stupid, but it seems in keeping with the way Cheney has lived his life.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer