More Pepper, Please

As part of our Presidents' Day Weekend festivities, my father-in-law Frank conducted an experminent to test the veracity of the Vice-President Dick Cheney's claim that he was 30 yards away from Harry Whittington when he "pulled the trigger of the gun that fired the shot that hit" (in other words, "shot") him. Frank's hypothesis is that a 30 yard shot from Cheney's 28-guage Italian-made "gentleman's gun" would create a much looser shot pattern than the one that "peppered" Whittington.
We set up a large cardboard box as a target and Frank took two shots at it with a 20-guage (about 20% greater diameter than a 28-guage) and a .410 (maybe half the size of a 28-guage). We apparantly weren't gentlemanly enough to have a Perazzi 28-guage handy.

You can compare the results of Frank's experiment the Texas Parks and Wildlife report, available from The Smoking Gun. According to the Houston Chronicle, "Whittington was struck by up to 200 shotgun pellets in the right torso, neck and face."

If you look at our target, which was shot twice, you won't see anywhere near 200 holes.

To test whether a 30 yard shot would even break the skin, we taped a potato onto the target. We found that the 20-guage shot easily penetrated the potato. Ouch. The 20-guage shot had no trouble penetrating completely through the cardboard box, exiting out the back. The .410 guage shot appeared to only penetrate the first layer. It didn't exit the back.

To further replicate the conditions of the Cheney-Whittington shooting, we also had "a beer" with lunch, though some witnesses couldn't recall that.
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