Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Shooting at reel foot lake

Being a connected man of means, he may have cooled off a bit then called his lawyer.
He could easily be out of the area somewhere evaluating his situation and getting his affairs in order.

Be my guess it ain't over ducks it was a case perceived rights and trespass on those rights. You try taking something from someone that has had them for years and believes they belong to him you better be ready to fight, those young guys underestimated that old boys' desire to keep what he thought was his my guess. Mb

Must be true then

I've seen a few of these cases before. There is always more to the story.

The older I get, the more I understand to avoid conflict if possible. You never know what other people are thinking or going through.

sounds pretty authoritative

I've heard it said before, never F~ck with an old man , he has seen much , heard more, and "life with out parole isn't much of a deterrent !

And I can hear the two kids yelling back at him, "Hey f~ck off and die old man" .

This wasn't over ducks at all, it was just a total lack of decency, by two bunches of people that had more hate for each other, than eithers love of life itself.

I can't see him leaving the country. A 70 year old guy, probably born in Tennessee. I don't think he would be happy in some foreign country.
Besides, he gets indicted for first degree murder, most countries would ship him back, to face the music.
I believe Ireland does not have an extradition treaty but most countries do.

Fascinating thread, this is one of the reasons I am on this forum, a hunting disaster news story that would not make the news around here.

To further expound, from guys that have hunted out of the blind that the 2 guys were killed in, even naming it by name, that the shooting victims were not in the shooters blind. That the shooter had his own, different blind, next to theirs. But yes, I read it on the internet, so it must be true. Or not. Almost as true as the tresspassing, that wasn't. Maybe.

I think that I'll wait for the official report to come out.

I wonder why he left a living witness to testify against him?

There's a distinct possibility he wasn't thinking too clearly.

Probably had a plug in.

Maybe the third guy 'ducked'?
Too soon? Sorry, I'll be quiet now..

I hunted Ducks once.. I would shoot you if you tried to make me do it again... and not worry about being arrested. at 83 jail time dosen't scare me anymore.. but I might shoot you anyway..

The way they are about their blinds out there, the jury may buy, "Justifiable Homicide".

Self defense likely to be hard to swallow as well.

I'm 70 years old, feared for my life so I shot 3 people 1/3 my age before they could get a round off....

He ain't Bob Munden.

Sonuvabitch!

History of terrorism rests in waters of Reelfoot Lake

The next time you go fishing or boating, you might contemplate this fact: Use of a lake was once the cause of a violent chapter in Tennessee history.

It happened more than a century ago, on what was (at that time) Tennessee’s only major lake. Reelfoot Lake, in northwest Tennessee, was formed by the New Madrid Earthquakes of 1811-1812. As a result of those earthquakes, water overflowed the banks of the Mississippi River and inundated present-day Lake and Obion counties. Much of that water eventually receded, but a lot of it stayed, forming a body of water that is about 23 square miles in size but whose average depth is only about 5½ feet deep.

Settlers began moving into northwest Tennessee after the Chickasaw Indians were forced out in 1818. Many of these settlers found they could make a good living as fishermen.

However, in 1908 a company called the West Tennessee Land Co. bought Reelfoot Lake’s shoreline and declared its intention to close the lake to fishing.

The people who made their living fishing felt threatened. One of them, Tom Johnson of the Obion County community of Hornbeak, was quoted by the Union City newspaper as saying:

“(God) saw that we couldn’t make a livin’ farmin’, so he ordered an earthquake, an’ the earthquake left a big hole. Next he filled the hole with watah an’ put fish in it. Then he knew we could make a livin’ between farmin’ and fishin’. But along comes these rich men who don’t have to make no livin’, an’ they tell us all that we must not fish in the lake any mo’, ’cause they owns the lake an’ the fish God put theah foh us. It jus’ naturally ain’t right, strange; it ain’t no justice.’”

At the time, there was a nationally publicized rebellion in southern Kentucky going on between tobacco farmers and the American Tobacco Co. As part of that rebellion, many tobacco farmers donned black sheets and began making night attacks on tobacco company property as well as on farmers who were siding with it. They became known as “nightriders,” and although they were probably inspired by the original Ku Klux Klan and its methods, they were not officially connected to it.

Many of the fishermen and their friends began making “nightrider”-type raids of their own against the West Tennessee Land Co. The wave of terrorism went on for about seven months and, as so often happens with lawlessness and terrorism, soon became an instrument of vengeance against people who may have had nothing to do with the West Tennessee Land Co. Crops were burned, docks were burned, men and women were taken from their homes and beaten.

In one case, nightriders dragged a woman named Emma Johnson out of her bed and away from her 2-year-old baby. Why? Because she had sued her husband (one of the nightriders) for divorce.

The nightriders also randomly turned their anger toward African Americans, or toward young men who refused to join their number.

The trouble peaked on Oct. 19, 1908, when Quenton Rankin and R.G. Taylor, two attorneys associated with the land company, were taken from a hotel in the community known as Walnut Log. Rankin was hanged from a tree and shot. Taylor escaped into the swamp amid a storm of bullets and was presumed dead. He survived by hiding under a cypress log for 24 hours.

Tennessee Gov. Malcolm Patterson called out the Tennessee National Guard. Working together with law enforcement officials from several states as well as hundreds of volunteers, they rounded up about 50 suspects. In January 1909, a jury found eight of them guilty and handed six of the eight the death sentence. The verdicts and the sentences were, at the time, hailed as a triumph of law and order, since the attorney general, judge and jury were all reportedly receiving threats during the trial.

“The conviction of these men,” said the Memphis Commercial Appeal, “marks the turning point of nightriderism toward its decline.”

However, the Tennessee Supreme Court overturned all of the convictions because of the way the judge chose members of the jury. They were later retried, but none of them ever did prison time for the murder of Quenton Rankin or for all the other acts of terrorism.

In 1914, Tennessee purchased Reelfoot Lake and much of its shoreline. A law was passed declaring the lake public domain, which means people can fish there, regardless of who owns the land around it.

Very solid, indeed. And you could always shoot clays, they eat better.