Why do these awful accidents happen?

Carelessness I suppose??!!

Overly excited and a momentary lapse in good judgement is probably to blame BUT anyone to sends a round is responsible for the outcome.

Tragic indeed.

Zeke

Very, very sad. But, some hunters get 'buck fever' and it becomes so overpowering in them that they shoot at the slightest sound or movement. This veteran had apparently been wounded in some foreign campaign, and likely suffers from PTSD and who knows what effect that had as well. I am sure that Mr. Ellis, who organized this hunt for the wounded veteran, is caught up in terrible emotions over the death of his son. Other things that might be into play would be turkey decoys, sitting close to the same, calling with a turkey call, camouflage, etc. etc. etc. All in all, a very tragic ending to something that could have had a completely different outcome, but for a split second of carelessness. With that, lives were forever changed.

I always tell new shooters these 2 absolutes.
1. Never point a gun at anything you don't want to kill or destroy.
2. You can not get a bullet back.

Perry

Pure stupitiy, no matter who to blame.you don't shoot at anything that you can;t fully see

quote:

you don't shoot at anything that you can;t fully see

And fully recognize as legal game.

I am not condoning the action.

However, whoever was organizing this appears to have had too many guns in the field in too close proximity to one another.

Many years ago, we were hunting in Zimbabwe, and had a hard time shooting a sable.

One morning, we saw a herd with a good bull in it.

And as usual, they were in some bush, and very hard to see which is which.

We stood there about 200 yards away, as they passed through a small gap in the bush.

Roy was looking with his binoculars, and I had my rifle sighted on the small opening.

Roy said "he walking towards that gap, get ready"

A few seconds later, I saw horns appear at the gap, and I started pressing on the trigger, as the body was coming clear, I was increasing the pressure on the trigger, but saw that the animals was not BLACK! it was a cow!

Too late to stop, so I yanked the gun up as it fired!

We went to look for any sign of blood, hoping that it was a clean miss.

It was, and we were so happy for it!

We had a bit of a laugh about it later on.

Saying we normally don't like misses, but this one calls for a celebration!

The bitterest sort of remorse for all involved. Just awful.

This was infinitely worse than sad. Horrifically tragic is woefully insufficient to describe this incident.

There are many victims in his incident. I'm sure the veteran who fired the fatal round is a basket case.

It's enticing to form opinions about what happened and assign blame. I would caution against falling into that trap. All we have is hearsay, which is euphemism for junk.

We should wait until the sheriff concludes his investigation. He will not release other than superficial facts while he's conducting his investigation. When the sheriff has completed his investigation and facts become known, we'll have a clearer picture of what happened and why. It might turn out to be an accident death rather than negligent homicide.

A horrible tragedy.