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.
Also, it was a blank, so the kid doesn’t have a bullet hole. None of this excuses wielding a firearm irresponsibly in a crowd of people, and I’ll take “Trigger discipline” for $200, Alex. Just wanted to bring to the fore that the kid will be okay.
A home made blank from glue and gunpowder lmao
What are you some kind of city boy that buys his blanks at the store?
I pull my own blanks hot. Can’t get them like that in no store.
We still talking about boolits?
A homemade cartridge with a conventional bullet replaced with a glue projectile.
Blanks can kill, ask Brandon Lee.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandon_Lee#Death
So two blanks, one with no powder and the other with no bullet, effectively formed one round of live ammunition. What a truly wild story.
He wasn’t really killed with a blank.
Right, he was killed by two, like they just quoted.
And also “not pointing a gun toward a crowd” discipline.
It says they meant to point it upward and it slipped but “not drawing a gun in a crowd” would have been better.
“Not having a gun in a crowd” would have been better.
It “slipped”?! How about not firing guns if your hands are not dexterous enough to point it correctly. Pretty much any time you fire a gun there is going to be a direction it could “slip” to that will kill someone.
Back to the lack of trigger discipline
Gun safety rules.
Every gun is considered loaded until proven otherwise. Every pull of the trigger will cost $10,000, as lawyers become involved, per NRA literature. Hearing damage by firing close to people is another risk.
Kid will survive, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be traumatized. Still, I’m glad the guy at least had the foresight not to stick a real bullet in there… why he thought firing a gun was the best way to get attention, though, is beyond me. If someone fires a gun in my near vicinity I’m not suddenly going to go “ohhh, it’s time to pay attention to the pastor” Nah. Imma be running for the hills before I even know my legs are moving
The next one might not because America’s gun laws – especially in Texas – are based on voluntarily following good practises.
Whenever something like this happens, pro-gun people flock to the comments to pat themselves on the back by telling everyone that they would never do that with a gun because they have trigger discipline and they treat guns with respect.
But so what? They might never drive drunk but that doesn’t mean we can abolish DUI laws.
What laws did this guy break and what is his punishment? Was it illegal to make his own sketchy blanks? Was it illegal to injure an innocent person with a firearm? Was it illegal to have a firearm at a wedding or to brandish it? Is he going to be prevented from owning firearms in the future now that he has proven to be a dumb fuck?
And most importantly, what is the pro-gun community going to do to prevent things like this happening again?
But we know the answer. He probably broke zero laws and will still be able to own all the guns he wants and take them to all the weddings he wants. His punishment will be minor or non-existent. The pro-gun community will do absolutely nothing to address the shortcomings of their laws, they’ll just tut about it on the internet.
Republicans value $16 million a year and a voting bloc that will tolerate anything over people’s lives. The gun lobby values profits over people’s lives.
But the pro-gun community sells people out for convenience.