I should know better

I came across it scrawled on a wall in Glasgow, in green paint. "Duck Cheney".

The whole Cheney shooting incident hasn`t attracted too much attention here. It`s difficult for us to know quite what to make of it. No politician here would be seen with a gun in his hand - it would play so badly at the polls - let alone try to laugh off actually shooting someone. It seems we have very different hunting cultures.

I think in America shooting as a sport comes from a tradition of going out and bringing back something for the pot to keep the family fed. In this country it stems from a tradition of going out and proclaiming your ownership of land by killing whatever you can find on it. It`s a class thing. (Going out and bringing back something for the pot to keep the family fed was a quite different tradition, known as poaching - often an extreme sport.)

Most people in this country dislike and mistrust guns. Like foxhunting, shooting tends to be associated by the media with obsolescent arrogant upper class values, and shooters tend to keep a low profile. One exception is the Royal Family , who bang away happily at anything furry or feathered that moves (preferably not quickly enough.) However, since the Queen received a lot of unsympathetic news coverage some years ago when spotted at a shoot battering a wounded pheasant to death, even they have been more circumspect.

(I suppose one way to a life of rich leisure would be to suffer a Cheney - type peppering with shot at a Royal shoot: I can imagine that the payoff for a lifetime`s silence would be very satisfying, always assuming you were left in a fit condition to enjoy it... )

But getting back to the Cheney incident, as a responsible gun owner myself I have to conclude that anyone who can mistake a noted lawyer and lobbyist for a small brown bird should be disarmed and gently led away to a secure place where he can be cared for.

I`m certainly not going as far as those people who have been speculating as to how old he really is and asking.......could his very first juvenile attempt at quail hunting have been on the grassy knoll?