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.
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.
The issue isn’t mental healthcare though. That’s insulting to everyone who deals with mental health problems, and the US doesn’t uniquely have mental health problems compared to the rest of the West.
I don’t like like making multiple replies to the same person, and this is already my second, so I’m going to lump in my response to another comment – the way you were brought up around guns, that fucking around will get someone hurt and you should never point it unless you’re going to shoot – needs to be drilled into every gun owner. I do truly believe that we can drastically reduce gun violence without taking away all guns. If owners have to regularly demonstrate they’ve internalized the mantra, we’ll see fewer deaths. If we deny guns to people who want to use them to make a point, we’ll see fewer deaths. We need to restrict ownership so idiots and violent people can’t get their hands on a gun.
Mental healthcare definitely is shitty in the country, you can’t deny that, I suffer from insomnia and ADHD so I’m well aware of the state of our mental healthcare here,it’s better than it was in the past, but it’s still not great. We don’t give those in need proper support (why do you think there are so many mass shootings? Your average sane person doesn’t unload on a crowd of people at a music festival, school, or mall, do they? They have long standing issues that weren’t properly dealt with and they cracked.). That’s not the case in this instance though, this guy was just an absolute moron. We need to standardize the gun laws federally because it’s currently a mess state to state. I can’t buy a BB gun here in NJ but someone in Texas could walk into a store and buy a rifle that day and walk out with it.