A Texas man accidentally shot a child while officiating a wedding in Lancaster County on Saturday, the sheriff’s office says.
Chief Deputy Ben Houchin said deputies were sent to a wedding at Hillside Events near Denton on a report of a gunshot wound.
Deputies learned that 62-year-old Michael Gardner, the wedding’s officiant, fired a gun to get everyone’s attention.
“He was going to fire in the air, and as he did that, it slipped and went off,” Houchin said.
The gun was loaded with a blank that Gardner made with gunpowder and glue.
“buh guns not the the problem!1!”
They truly aren’t, this is straight up lack of brain cells that’s the issue here
Someone who makes their own blank and whips it out at a wedding near a child simply to get folks attention is so fucking dumb he’d find a way to hurt himself with his dinner fork
The issue isn’t the tool, it’s the retard wielding it
You’d think the “don’t ban guns” people would be all for registration and background checks. After all, guns aren’t the problem, people are.
Yeah 100% if you want to own a class of gun (say a revolver) you should have to take a class on that specific type of gun and pass a written and practical test, and renew this regularly. Want a different type of gun? Better go take that class and pass that test.
Rabid anti gun folks are just as bad as the rabid pro gun folks, but the regular ass folks in the middle all seem to agree that strong controls on who can purchase the dangerous tool is the most reasonable solution
But this is lemmy, basically Reddit but more intense. I fully expect the folks here to be rabid anti gun without any rationale arguments for that stance
Americans have an estimated 120 guns per 100 citizens, almost double that of the country with the second highest amount of firearms per capita.
Tell me again how that isn’t a problem.
It’s a tool. Blame the idiots that don’t use it correctly, not the tool itself
There are 908 motor vehicles per 1000 citizens in the US (source
In 2020, there were 5,250,837 vehicle collisions in America source
Tell me again how cars aren’t the problem.
Oh wait, that’s right, they are just a tool. The problem is people.
The problem is that an idiot with no brain cells was allowed to have a gun.
Copy pasted for like the 8th time in this god damn thread now
Yeah 100% if you want to own a class of gun (say a revolver) you should have to take a class on that specific type of gun and pass a written and practical test, and renew this regularly. Want a different type of gun? Better go take that class and pass that test.
Rabid anti gun folks are just as bad as the rabid pro gun folks, but the regular ass folks in the middle all seem to agree that strong controls on who can purchase the dangerous tool is the most reasonable solution
But this is lemmy, basically Reddit but more intense. I fully expect the folks here to be rabid anti gun without any rationale arguments for that stance
Most people that are pro gun aren’t against stricter gun control measures, the problem is we don’t live in society where we can tell who will do something dumb in the future. Blanket bans don’t help anyone.
I would rather cage stupid people than implement stricter gun control to be honest. I think that would go a hell of a lot farther in improving society.
But the gun literally isn’t the problem, it’s the idiot with the gun. The gun isn’t sentient. The problem is we allow stupid people to own guns.
Edit: just the downvotes on this comment show that people think guns=bad
If this idiot didn’t have a gun in this situation, no one would have gotten shot.
Generally when people say or suggest that, “Guns are a problem,” they don’t mean the literal inanimate objects are the sole issue; it’s a shorthand way to refer to many things including access to firearms, lack of background checks, proper training, lobbying, and much more.
And that’s why heated debates like this happen, because people don’t say what they mean. A lot of people do really think the gun is the problem though.
I was raised around guns and shot them at a young age (10ish, I’m from South Jersey, not Nowhere USA), it was instilled in me “You don’t fuck around with guns. Period. If you do, someone will end up getting hurt. It doesn’t matter if it’s a paintball gun, a BB gun, or a shotgun. Treat it with respect and only point it at things you wish to kill (metaphorically speaking for paintball guns)”.
The major problem is the lack of training and respect for the weapon. People treat it like it’s a party noise maker or an accessory to make you look cool/bad ass.
Everyone is stupid though, or will be. Humans are fragile and will deteriorate to the point of loss of control or sense of reality. It is the future we all share. Most of us will not die with our dignity intact.
How you going to let such dumb, fragile, emotional, unstable animals carry killing machines just whenever? Of course this is what happened.
I’m for more consistent regulations state to state, but saying “take away all the guns, problem solved” is like putting a bandaid on an infected wound. You’re not treating the cause, our mental healthcare and healthcare in general is shit in this country. People want an easy fix and I don’t blame them.
Ffs so you know how pedantic you sound right now? Yes technically a gun just sitting somewhere locked and unloaded is usually not the issue the problem is they are freaken everywhere. There is probably enough rounds of ammo in civilian hands in the US to literally wipe out humanity. When you have this much of something even if an absurdly small percentage is misused it means it will happen every day.
Ffs so you know how pedantic you sound right now?
🥱
“I don’t like what you’re saying, so I’m gonna insult you for saying it.”
This person should never be allowed a firearm again right? He has abused our rights and therefor can not be trusted with the responsibility. Yet still those “rights shall not be infringed” folk will fight for him to carry whatever he wants.
Which is why nobody is demanding guns are thrown in jail, they’re demanding laws that make even a token effort to minimise the risk to the public.
But the pro-gun community responds with vapid “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” talking points, fed to them by a gun lobby that doesn’t care what kills people, as long as the profits keep soaring.
Legal gun owners kill people, with guns.
They make up 80% of mass shooters but when you ask the pro-gun community what they’re going to change to stop legal gun owners doing mass shootings, they proudly boast “nothing” – they’re content to keep selling guns to blatantly dangerous people and letting people die.
Children are killing themselves in record numbers using their father’s legally owned guns but when you ask the pro-gun community what they’re going to do about poorly secured firearms, they proudly boast “nothing” – they want to keep guns in gloveboxes and bedsides lest they miss their chance at a “get out of murder free” and they don’t care if criminals and kids get their hands on them.
And of course, every week there’s a new story about a legal gun owner doing something stupid with a gun but when you ask the gun community what they’re going to do about stupid people with guns, once again they proudly boast “nothing”. They’ll double over to suck their own dicks because it wasn’t them but they won’t budge an inch to ensure “responsible gun owners” are actually responsible.
So fuck em and their second amendment. They’ve been insisting they had all the answers for 20 years and they’ve fixed exactly nothing, so I’ve got no idea why they’re welcome in the conversation at all, let alone dictating when it can happen and what can be discussed.
If they throw a tantrum about their rights, fuck em still. Statistically they’ve repeatedly voted to trample the rights of others and even if they haven’t, their guns did nothing to stop it happening, despite what we were promised.
If they want to follow through on their threats to become domestic terrorists, fuck em even harder. It shows they were never as far from firing on innocent people as they claimed and if they want to die in a hail of bullets, at least it’s them dying for their guns for once.
If they do not give an inch, they will be forced to accept a mile. The obstinacy on action and refusal to allow any changes is just moving people more and more to the extreme on this issue. If the NRA doesn’t want to come to the table, they’ll see their guns confiscated at gunpoint.
This isn’t a threat, it’s an observation. It’s why there’s the saying “those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable”. We are going to get the gun violence under control one way or another.
Obviously not, but nothing happens in vacuum. Banning guns screws over all the people that use them legally and responsibly. It’s like saying “we should ban all cars because some people can stop driving while drunk”. The real solution is removing the idiot from the equation.
Propose a solution then. How do we stop this from happening again? We cannot simply say “ah well this is the price of gun ownership” and do nothing.
It’s absolutely unacceptable, and a growing number of Americans, especially young people, do not want this to continue.
Gun proponents thus have a choice. Find a way for this to not be the price of gun ownership, or see gun ownership go away. If you do nothing, the extreme solutions to confiscate guns and the like are more likely to happen.
First off, we could make more consistent laws federally. Laws differ greatly from state to state. Here in NJ, I can’t even buy a damn BB gun at a sporting goods store and it takes at least two weeks to get any deadly firearm, yet in some place like Texas, I could probably walk into a sporting goods store and buy a hunting rifle that day and walk out with it.
As a more direct response to your question: if you do something dumb with a gun, your ownership rights should be hindered or completely revoked, and you should be fined/jailed/held responsible for your actions. Treat it the same way we treat motor vehicles. You get caught driving drunk? You can’t drive for a few weeks/months, you get caught again? It gets revoked longer this time, etc… You get caught speeding? You get fined. Pretty simple.
The problem is we have all these “you won’t infringe on my second amendment rights!” idiots and lobbyists that prevent any changes from happening.
Fucking backward degenerates.
The child should’ve also carried a gun to protect themselves from bad wedding officiants.
The only thing that stops a bad pastor with a gun is a good toddler with a gun.
If it was a blank, how can you hit someone with it?
Just because the cartridge doesn’t have a bullet doesn’t mean nothing comes out of the business end.
With a properly functioning blank, there shouldn’t be any projectile coming out of the muzzle. This guy made his own with gunpowder and glue, so apparently there was some kind of glue blob that was a projectile.
The force of the expanding gas is sufficient to hurt people, even with a properly made blank. It’s why a gun designed to fire only blanks doesn’t even have a barrel with an opening that could compress the gas.
It’s why you generally avoid firing a gun of any sort in a crowd. Even when they’re as safe as possible, they’re not safe.
Technically Brandon Lee was killed by a bullet. They removed the powder but left the bullet (for appearance sake since it was a revolver and would be noticeable). Since there was no powder the bullet didn’t fire out of the gun when the trigger was pulled but the primer (which wasn’t removed) igniting created enough force to put the bullet in the barrel where it got jammed.
No one noticed the jammed bullet, and when they next fired it with blanks this time (powder charge, no bullets) the powder was now forceful enough to fire the bullet out of the gun.
Essentially they accidentally made a revolver into a breach loaded firearm.
What gets me about that is, yeah, they didn’t check the barrel, but when they pulled the dummy rounds out to put in the blanks why didn’t anyone notice that one of the casings was missing its bullet? Shouldn’t that be an easy thing to spot?
The gun was loaded with a blank that Gardner made with gunpowder and glue.
This is why. He shot gunpowder and hardened glue projectiles at a child. If you put a blank in a gun, put the gun to your temple and pull the trigger, you can still die. In fact, it has happened before.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/71752/how-do-blanks-work-compared-regular-bullets
Says it was a homemade blank made from gunpowder and glue. Depends on the construction but the glue “bullet” (probably just a plug to keep the gunpowder in) should explode in the barrel and shoot out basically dust.
However you can’t guarantee the glue plug would fully disintegrate and at close range the debris can be moving fast enough to cause damage and can be hot enough to burn.
His death was a squib load, which is where a bullet is lodged in the barrel, not in the casing. The blast from the blank projected the bullet out of the barrel.
But yes, just the blast can kill too.
Because it’s a bullet without the bullet - it’s still a directed explosion that could kill someone with air pressure alone if you’re close enough
Now let’s say there’s something in the barrel, or in this case a chunk of glue from a home made blank propelled out at the speed of a bullet. It’s a lot less force or energy than a piece of lead, but everything is pretty deadly when it’s going faster than the speed of sound
Had the child been armed, this tragedy would have never occurred. 'Murica!
