We’re not going to do it. But a reader offers what sounds like a fair complaint about the Cheney experimenters post I put up below and I figured I should offer it in the spirit of fairness:

Jonah,
I wasn’t terribly impressed by the website supposedly investigating the Cheney shooting incident. They claimed to use identical shot size and charge weight to that involved in the incident. But they seem to use the terms interchangeably for the shot between pellets and BBs. The BB, as was pointed out in the section on the ballistic gel penetration test, has a diameter more than double that of a size 7 ½ pellet, and a mass much more than double. The ballistic gel test was invalid since the fall-off in velocity and retained energy is greater in the smaller shot, because of the differing ratio between the cross-sectional area (yielding wind resistance) and mass (relating to inertia), which yields different retained energy (thus penetration) for the two sizes. These testers, like the other re-creators I’ve seen, fail to understand that there is a horizontally elongated shot pattern when a shotgun is fired while swinging. This has the result of reducing the number of pellet hits within a round target area. They also make the claim that dead and eviscerated Cornish game hens are only slightly less active than pen-raised quail, which is a definite exaggeration, and they assume that the quail involved at the Armstrong ranch were pen-raised, which Ms. Armstrong and several other sources vigorously deny.
As long as I’m on the soapbox, I should also mention the furor over Cheney’s not having had an upland game bird stamp. The clearest statement on the matter points out that Cheney’s aide wrote out a check to cover all of the licensing costs, but that the total charged was for the license and all stamps except for the upland game bird stamp. This charge included the cost of a waterfowl stamp that Cheney already had. The clerk, who was specifically told that a quail hunt was in the offing, made a mistake. Cheney committed a technical violation of the new regulation when he did not personally check to make sure that all of his licensing forms and stamps were complete and present, but it is clear that he had no intention of going without necessary requirements.