Tragedy is when I cut my finger, comedy is when you get shot to death because someone in your hunting party mistakes your head for a squirrel.
Oh, I get it.
But a supervised(like get out of the lazy boy and take your kid out and supervise their shooting) kid is different than two 16-17yo romping thru the woods, armed. Yeah, no.
Tragic as this is for family they will be subjected to questions and maybe some ridicule. It’s sad any way you look at it.
FWIW, I’m the first to make fun of hunters and their accidents: this story reminded me of the old German, pun based and untranslatable joke:
“Treffen sich zwei Jäger. Beide tot.”
“Two hunters meet. Both dead.”
The joke is that “sich treffen” both means a) “to meet” and b) “to hit each other (with a bullet)”.
My understanding of squirrel hunting is you are looking up. Always. Not head high. Tree top high.
We knew a guy who accidentally shot his squirrel dog.. the first question to him was; how did your dog get up the tree?
The original quote from Mel Brooks of course being “Tragedy is when I cut my finger; comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die”. I think his point is that if we can’t laugh at the sheer silliness of collective tragedies we will wither away. For instance, my friend Shannon has uterine cancer, and she just called My Beloved to say that she went in for treatment and they pulled out what she described as a “giant radiated dildo” (I swear to god, those were her words!). Uterine cancer is a major tragedy, and yet there we were laughing out loud with her.
It’s definitely tragic that a 17 year old died, and I feel sympathy for him and his family. There’s no one denying that. But lets face it, someone or someones, quite possibly including the victim himself, fucked up in a major way - in a way that could have been prevented. So yeah, we’re going to joke a bit, because there’s apparently no point in trying to DO anything to prevent this kind of thing from happening again.
I have some sympathy for the shooter as well. He’s got some ‘splainin’ to do. And he has to live with this. Forever.
Terrible.
IANA squirrel hunter. But squirrels are found on the ground, and at every elevation within a tree from the base to the crown.
It sure might be safer to only shoot at squirrels higher in a tree than your hunting companions are tall. But that same sort of restriction doesn’t apply to deer hunting, or indeed any other sorts of hunting I’m aware of. Dick Cheney was famously shot while bird hunting. Birds routinely operate much higher than squirrels do.
sure, I get that, and I don’t want to come off as some sort of holier than thou scold. I mean, I’ve laughed at the absurdity of Darwin award winners myself. But let’s just admit that’s what we’re doing here, not trying to claim this is some sort of “laugh so we don’t cry” defense mechanism to cope with the tragedy of the event.
But this statement seems to be a denial of the very purpose of most comedy.
Once when younger my brothers and me were “hunting” for squirrels. (We never shot a damn thing in all our hunts). After hours of tramping through the woods we sat at a picnic table on the edge of the field. A squirrel ran down a nearby tree and posed head up, looking at us at waist height. We just waved at him. Should’a used my knife. (Explanation in a new post).
There is still a little difference: ‘sich treffen’ and ‘einander treffen’. In English it would be ‘to meet’ and ‘to hit each other’.
It was a “child” (less than 12 months from being able to vote or join the military) who was out attempting to kill animals as entertainment. I call it a good day for the squirrels.
My uncle Lucky had a hook for a hand-he shot it off himself with a rifle during a weekend hunting. Stupid tragedy breeds humor, and he knew it and made good use of it.
There are always going to be some amount of risk to when we’re talking about physical activities. You might get killed walking to lunch while crossing the street, you could get into an accident while driving to work, you might hit a tree while skiing (double black diamond was not a good choice for a beginner), your parachute might malfunction, or you might accidentally shoot someone or even yourself while hunting. Of course you can mitigate risks by educating participants, engaging in safe practices, or by not even participating. But there’s always a non zero risk of catastrophic accidents and they’re probably going to happen each year.
While I’m not an avid hunter, I enjoy it on occasion. I honestly have a hard time understanding how someone can look through a scope or down a site and confuse a deer, squirrel, or any other animal with a human being. (Maybe if they were hunting chimpanzees?) I’ve never pointed a firearm at another human being, at least not while I was hunting, because I don’t point it at anything if I’m not certain what it is.
It was board game night the day Charlie Kirk died, and my friends and I were making tasteless jokes before his death was even confirmed. It would be hypocritical of me to judge anyone here for making the same tasteless jokes. Though in the case of Kirk, I knew who he was, which why I was indifferent to his death and it was easy to make light of it. For this kid, I don’t know what happened. Were they screwing around? I don’t know. It makes it a little harder for me to make light of it. And while I don’t think anyone here was personally affected by this kid’s death, I understand black humor as a response to a tragedy is perfectly normal. Like I said, I was making tasteless jokes about Kirk fairly quickly.
Dick Cheney wasn’t the one who was shot. Instead he shot his hunting companion.
If he had been mistaken for a deer, it would have been only a local story. But squirrel? That’s international news.
at what age would you stop using scare quotes for “child” and really consider this a tragedy? 15? 12?
nice
D’oh. 
You are of course correct. Cheney’s claim to humorous victimhood was having a mechanical heart.
Nevertheless, my point sorta still stands that despite Cheney & his companion being out for birds, it was still a critter at ground level that got shot.
I’m not DG. But …
It’s a darn shame that person is dead, but their age, be it 10, 20, or 50, changes nothing about the scope of the tragedy IMO. Their life is ended and they have grieving relatives.
As a (mostly) separate matter, refering to a 17yo as a “child” is infantilizing and frankly disrespectful to the deceased. It’s IMO disrespectful to living 17yos as well. As a geezer I certainly recognize that 17, hell 37, yos are still apprentice provisional adults at best. I sure was.
But whatever word we ought to use for their stage of life, “child” (scare quotes or no) is not it.