I cannot ignore this clip being passed around that shows Sarah Palin on a caribou hunt. Enough people have asked me about it that apparently I'm going to have to give it my two cents.
It is disappointing to see that she needs to have the rifle loaded for her. But I'm willing to chalk that up to her father simply enjoying the act of doing things for her and she is accustomed to it. However, she keeps pulling the trigger and has no idea how to work the bolt. Her father keeps having to reach around and cycle the action for her. An experienced hunter knows that the first thing you should automatically do after taking a shot on an animal is to ready another. Don't think about it or try to judge whether the first one did the job. You should put another round in the chamber no matter what.
Palin does not flinch when shooting either rifle. Her overall shooting habits suggest to me someone who has spent a lot of time plinking with a semi-automatic .22 rifle. Good form and follow-through, but she didn't have that instinct to instantly work the bolt. This makes me think that maybe she is used to having the next round pop in there by its self.
She fails to use the sling to get tight and steady. Again, that is something that I expect to see from someone who has spent a fair bit of time shooting off of a bench at a range but not so much in the field on wild animals.
Yes, she shot again and again with the first rifle without connecting. It is entirely possible that this scope was set up properly when it left the house, but maybe the rifle was dropped or took a hard knock along the way. That sort of thing can happen to anyone. In fact, it has happened to me although I have since learned to assume that the scope is out of zero after it takes a whacking and in those cases I will either re-check the zero with a few shots or switch to a back-up gun if one is available. Anyway, I wouldn't give her too much grief about having missed repeatedly with that rifle. I think this was a hardware problem rather than her aim.
Once she connects and hits the caribou, it was bad practice to immediately stand up and start with the high-fives. It is possible that video editing compressed the time line, but in real life you should never instantly assume that a big quadruped like that is down for the count. Especially when it drops to the shot instantly like that. While everything clearly worked out in this case, an animal that buckles instantly like that is often the victim of a spine shot.
There is a funny thing about slightly botched spine shots that any hunter should be aware of. I'm a big fan of the spine or 'high shoulder' shot myself, but its use needs to be tempered with an awareness that an animal hit in the dorsal projections on the tops of the vertebrae will receive a mighty shock to the nervous system and go down instantly in the same manner as a solid shot through the spinal cord. But that animal will probably leap to its feet within a minute or so and run off. Because of this danger, you should always work the bolt and keep the crosshairs on the animal for at least a full minute after observing a reaction like that to a shot. Be ready to get off a quick shot before it gets to its feet. Standing up and lowering the rifle is not conducive to that.
My greater concerns are with her poor examples of hunter safety. While Alaska does not legally mandate blaze orange, the state still strongly encourages its use during firearms hunting seasons and everyone on that hunt should have had some blaze orange on.
An even greater sin was the fact that Palin was shooting at a sky-lined animal. Everyone who has ever taken a basic hunter's safety course knows that you must never do this. One of the NRA's basic rules is "know your target and what is beyond." Whatever you happen to think about the NRA's politics or attitude, they are absolutely the best authority that there is on firearm safety. They invented the whole idea of hunter's safety education and in fact setting standards for this sort of thing has always been a major part of what they do.
She had no idea where any of her bullets were going to come to a stop. The second rifle she was shooting looked to me like a Remington Model 700 in (I'm guessing) 7mm Remington Magnum. Certainly the cartridges looked to be belted magnums and the barrel length looked to be about 26 inches, which is all consistent with the 7-mag. At about 100 yards, those bullets are going to punch right through the caribou and keep on going. Was there someone down on the other side of that ridge? Hikers? Other hunters? A whole herd of caribou half a mile away with one about to be hit in the paunch by her errant bullet? Who knows. Certainly not her. Shooting at a sky-lined animal was utterly irresponsible.
Not that I want to make Sarah Palin out to be some kind of willfully reckless slob hunter. I don't think that is the case at all. I think that she just has no idea what the hell she is doing. She is just following along with her father, putting her faith in a family member whom she trusts. I have read accounts from her former brother-in-law of hunts that he had been on with Palin's father, which were not especially flattering to either the brother-in-law or the father. I suggest that its her father who is the slob hunter, not Sarah Palin. He likes to take his daughter along on hunts every now and then and she likes to spend the time with him. She has said that she almost always hunts with him, which would pretty well explain the problem. We can see that he does every little thing for her on the hunt and only expects her to squeeze the trigger. The result is that she has no idea what she is doing and probably has no basis of comparison.
My suggestion to both father and daughter is that they attend and complete a free hunter's education course before hunting again. They both have some very bad habits to rid themselves of.
As a side-note, I would like to point out that taking someone on a hunt where all they do is squeeze the trigger doesn't really do anyone any good. A good hunting mentor should be concerned with teaching the new hunter the how and why of what is happening. Otherwise you aren't really creating a new hunter -- just a surrogate trigger finger. As a hunting tutor and mentor, I know how easy it is to get wrapped up in worry over making this person's day successful. You want to do everything for them and ensure that they go home feeling successful. But it is better to actually teach them and give them the skills to hunt on their own, possibly failing to make a kill at first but gaining the sense of independence necessary to become hunters in their own right.
8 comments:
Your comments are much more kind than the ones I was muttering to myself while watching this. She has no idea what she's doing. Watching her shoot a rifle is like watching her run for office. Someone else loads the rifle (or writes the speech, etc) and hands it to her for her to pull the trigger.
"Does it kick?" What a joke. I wouldn't be critical of anyone new to shooting or hunting acting the way she does, but this is a woman who has touted her rough outdoorsy nature as a political tool.
Everything about her is fake. I'm a conservative politically, and she is the conservative's worst nightmare.
@Virg,
I'm not sure that she even realizes that she is a phony hunter. I think that in her mind, the fact that she has followed along with her father on hunts many times has qualified her as a serious hunter in her own stead. For this reason I don't want to be too hard on her. I don't think she means any harm, and that counts for something.
But yeah, she has no idea what she is doing or talking about.
Although....my father (a big Palin fan, by the way) corrected me on one point. He watched the show on TLC tonight, which contained the same footage. Evidently later in the episode they test the first rifle and it is indeed way off to the right. That still doesn't excuse having to have Daddy work the bolt for you, or shooting at an animal on the horizon with no backstop.
Do they indicate how it got so far off to the right? I read another description that stated that her father was handling the rifle poorly. I've carried my hunting rifle through massive thicket, up hills, through bramble, etc and not had my scope lose zero. That is because I am mindful of where the scope is, and checked my zero before venturing out and I have set up my rifle correctly.
At least we know she couldn't possibly be hunting wolves from helicopters with a select fire weapon. ;-)
I am going to have to see this, looks like a good critque of her actual hunting skills, or lack thereof. I agree with anonymous that I never had my scopes go off zero because of shooting a few rounds or walking through the brush. I just constantly check my scope rings to make sure they are tight. I tell new hunters i mentor "keep your scopes rings tight". I learned about Palin's caribou hunt by reading an utterly disgusting column by Maureen Dowd in the NY Times, an anti-hunting liberal who would protect caribou habitat but ban or enact severe restrictions on hunting for them. Palin loves hunting them but her energy policies would destroy caribou habitat - the entire exchange raised the question who's politics are more anti-hunting, Dowd or Palin ?
@Erik, I have never thought of Maureen Dowd as especially liberal. I would consider her political alignment to be in support of irrelevant gossip and trivia rather than liberal or conservative.
Haven't visited your site in awhile. This is the best analysis I've read. The things that occurred to me (and have led to me closing the clip prematurely each time) were her inability to handle the bolt and the fact that she tried to take that shot standing/unsupported. Which is idiotic at that distance. "Does it kick" LOL.
As you said, she's probably experienced with a 22LR or even a shotgun, but for someone who preaches so much about being a "mama huntress" etc. she is a laughingstock.
There was a great takedown of the anti-Palin (and anti-hunting) backlash on (I believe) jezebel.com that ended by saying "There are many serious problems with Sarah Palin and her politics. Hunting meat is not one of them."
I thought that was an interesting way to put it.
@Jack:
Maureen Dowd is pro-Maureen Dowd and keeping herself employed. That's about as complex as that gets.
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