I'm always amazed at the number of ways people can find to shoot their hunting partners.
About 8 years ago a good friend went hunting on his own property on the last day of the season with a guy who hadn't seen a deer all year. They decide that the land owner will do a small one person drive of some isolated cover. The second guy says "If it's brown-it's down!" An hour later my buddy, who was wearing-you guessed it-brown camo-is dead from a side to side heart shot from a 12 ga. slug. The shooter's statement? "I saw brown and shot at it."
The two previous local fatalities involved an uncle shooting a nephew and, this year, a nephew shooting an uncle.
I'd bet that if I went back and looked at the hunting fatalities over the last ten years that a good 80+% of them were either self inflicted or they involve people from the same hunting party who got shot while doing what the shooter knew that they were doing. I can only remember two fatalities in the last several years that didn't. One involved a person shot by someone from another party. One involved a shooter, illegally within 500 feet of a dwelling, who was shooting at a running deer. A bullet passed through the wall of a home, struck a toddler in the chest and killed the child.
Lance