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.
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.
Seems we largely agree then. Those idiots need to read the 9th amendment. Paraphrased – the specific enumeration of rights in the Constitution shall not be used to deny our other rights. You can see two immediate corollaries from this:
Rights don’t have different strengths. Saying “shall not be infringed” is rather redundant, because none of our rights shall be infringed.
The conservatives on SCOTUS actively do what this amendment says not to do! They say nothing in the Constitution guarantees a right to an abortion, but the ninth amendment says it doesn’t give a shit. Unfortunately, SCOTUS has a design flaw, and there’s no way to hold them accountable for flagrantly acting unconstitutionally.