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!”
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
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.
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 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.
They truly aren’t, this is straight up lack of brain cells that’s the issue here
So we need to decide who gets guns then, right? Some kind of control?
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.
I’m all for background checks, even mandatory safety classes, it’s the random banning of features that gets me. Banning firearms because they have a pistol grip or more than 10 round magazines makes no sense. The problem is most people who think like this get lumped in with the crazies.
The right was given when guns were muskets. I have no issue following the forefathers intended right. You may have all the muskets you want but if it’s not needed for hunting or defending your home from an intruder then you shouldn’t have it. Nobody needs a hundred round clip or full auto for an intruder.
I hate to argue against you because I agree that nobody needs a hundred round clip or full auto for an intruder, but the forefathers’ intended right wasn’t “people should have muskets”. It was much closer to “the people should be armed in case of tyrrany by their government”. The intention was for people to defend their other rights by force, making it more difficult for the government (or an invading force) to take over (this was immediately post-revolution mind you and much of the bill of rights was in direct response to british soldiers’ activities). Of course they also thought we’d be reforming the government and drafting new constitutions as the culture changed, but of course that never happened.
I am not a historian, just a pedant.
I mean I get you are playing Devil’s advocate but its clear we have also moved far those ideals. You are right the founding fathers didn’t just say “people should have muskets” but we also have to think in the context of the times, private companies were also able to be armed with naval cannons but in the modern day I don’t think Pepsi, Coke, Johnson and Johnson, or Nestle have an battalion of M1 Abrams and F22 raptors and the such. Like we are told we have the right to bear arms and in those days would be able to purchase the same arms that the military uses but I don’t think I would want a world where every idiot can somehow afford and operate nukes, apache helicopters, etc. Hell while full automatic weapons aren’t “technically” illegal in the US they are heavily regulated and expensive to possess and we the common people are boxed out owning such devices. So its clear we are “compromising” on the vision already quite a bit. Hell I would hope even some of the most die hard conservatives would think a private citizen owning the right such devices would be a bit much as well.
https://constitution.congress.gov/constitution/amendment-2/
The founding father’s used capitalization to put emphasis on certain terms. It seems to me that they wanted the well regulated Militia, made up of the people, to keep and bear Arms to protect the State and by extension themselves from a tyrannical federal government. If they intended the people to bear arms, why did they add the terms Militia, State, and Arms with emphasis but the people without it?
The only other place in the Constitution that speaks about what constitutes a militia is the fifth amendment, and it specifically only protects a Militia when it is in service to the government, which again is capitalized because they wanted emphasis that it was a proper militia and not a make shift one.
I agree with you, but I wouldn’t read that much into their writing. The English language was even more lawless in their day.
In fact, the German-style capitalization of nouns may have just been a stylistic choice by the calligrapher:
https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2012/fall/const-errors.html
The Second Amendment was never about hunting or home defense. It was about arming yourself against the government and to defend your other rights by force. In which case you should have every feature you can afford. Also, about muskets, the founding fathers understood the march of progress would eventually create bigger and more powerful smalls arms, they even wanted the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalthoff_repeater for their army to stay ahead. To think the second amendment only covers muskets is moronic.
Cool, so we’ll be taking those away from law enforcement and the military too then, right?
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If they actually out-and-out banned anything, I’m sure it was for monetary reasons, not for health and safety. But idk, it seems like a small price to pay, you still get to feel like John Wayne whenever you want. Sorry you can’t really fuck up that paper target like you want, but don’t worry, it’s dead.
The second amendment wasn’t made for plinking, hunting, or home defense. It was made to allow the common citizen to defend their rights by force against the government. In which case you should have every feature you can afford available to you.
No. It wasn’t. I’ve seen you say this more than once in this thread. The right to bear arms was intended to defend the US against a foreign military, as the founding fathers did not want a standing army. Obviously that was retarded, but they were a bunch of rich slave owning assholes, so maybe you need a new set of guiding principles.
How do you feel about the forced reset trigger?
Sounds fun
For what it’s worth, people like you are necessary if we’re going to have a future without gun violence while maintaining gun ownership. My understanding is that banning specific guns really doesn’t do anything.
Most people stop at that, but I appreciate that you go on to say what will work instead. Mandatory safety classes and comprehensive background checks that include psychological evaluation are necessary. And if someone rabid comes into a safety class and says they want a gun to make a point or uses a racial slur in the process, they should be denied ownership and that should be recorded in a manner that background checks will see it. They’d be free to retake the class, but until they reform their behavior and show responsibility, they won’t get a gun.
I reckon that’s probably agreeable to you? I think it would go a long way. The other half of the puzzle is strengthening and enforcing the laws we currently have on the books. Police need to be held accountable if they refuse to enforce a gun law, including prosecution as an accessory to murder if warranted.
There’s so many times after a shooting when information comes out that they were a troubled individual who showed some violent tendencies. That should have been caught in advance.
At this point it’s been proven psych evals don’t really work, firearms classes and background checks should be plenty to stop people with issues and allow us I not have our rights infringed upon.
Works for me. We should just have an option for a medical provider to say they don’t believe the person will be safe with a gun – this goes for not only homicidal tendencies, but people at risk of suicide.
Your ideas are incredibly radical. We first must imagine the mindset of dead 200 year old wealthy men before we do such a thing.
Or send anyone over the age of 16 who you wouldn’t trust to be safe with a gun to reeducation camp until they get their shit together.
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
Your comment seems needlessly inflammatory, almost aggressive. I did not vote on it at all, but I would not be surprised if the downvotes you received were mostly because of that and not due to disagreement with your points.
Yeah my bad. I’m tired of every single time a fun in mentioned seeing “just get rid of all of them it’s so easy” then when I reply with reasonable solutions, get shit on. Just tired of it. Shouldn’t have bothered to comment on this thread in the first place
Copy pasted for like the 6th time 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
You are a walking strawman factory 🤣
Cool. I don’t care. I just want to keep my family safe. If that offends you I couldn’t give a fuck less
Yeah, I’m really feeling that lack of general empathy! No surprises here my man.
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Picture if he didn’t have a gun how this situation would have went.
He could have shot the child with a bow and arrow :(
He probably would have used firecrackers or something. At least then it would have probably only have been his own fingers.
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
Do you think he would have killed a child accidentally with a dinner fork?
The child didn’t die in this case, but yeah I think someone this dumb could easily have some similar damage with something more innocuous
That’s not really the point though…. Guy like this should never have passed certification process to get a gun if we had proper controls in place. Something that I always argue for but because I’m arguing for good testing and controls and limits rather than outright banning and forcible confiscation all the privileged folks that have never had to defend their families come out of the woodwork to shit in my face, every time
So he probably shouldn’t have a gun then…
This asshole? Definitely not
It can be both
Someone who is living in a allegedly first world country who needs to carry a gun around is the issue.
Hey if you’ll pay to move my family to a safe neighborhood give you my gun
The problem is that an idiot with no brain cells was allowed to have a gun.
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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.
No, it would be useless to ban blankets, everyone would be cold 🤓
But restrictions on carrying would make a lot more sense. They should not be carrying a weapon in a crowded area
I agree, dumb fucks shouldn’t be allowed to walk around with guns and do whatever they want. Anytime I see a post of some idiot walking around town with an AR-15 on his back I want to punch them in the face.
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.
The problem is that caging stupidity doesn’t prevent harm. What about the toddler who got shot? It would be far better to try to prevent the situation from happening in the first place
Maybe I need to be more clear. These people would be caged preemptively upon being identified as a moron, not just after they do something stupid with a gun. This idiot would have been in the cage instead of out shooting toddlers.
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
Or maybe you’re getting downvoted because everyone is sick of you spamming the thread with your hot take and whining.
Just like I’m sick of seeing jUst gET riD Of aLl tHe guNs itS sUPer siMpLe
Funny thing though. It doesn’t look like anyone says that in any of the threads where you copy-pasted your little screed.
Look harder
Looking once already wasted enough of my time. I’m done engaging with your crap.