SHOTGUNS

SHOTGUNS

Vice president Cheney's recent hunting mishap reminds me of the first friend I ever lost. I was about 13 or 14 years old. Tom Remley, a kid I played baseball with, was out hunting with his father and older brothers. They were walking through farm fields and had to get through a barbed wire fence. Tommy leaned his gun against the fence, slipped through and then pulled his shotgun through barrel first. It went off and blew his abdomen away. That was the first funeral of a friend I ever attended. It was about 30 years later when I first went hunting with a shotgun. We were hunting pheasant on a farm in central Ohio. I never got one. I don't think I tried that hard. It was the last time I ever hunted.