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
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.
It doesn’t seem that heated to me? Also I’ve never spoken to anyone who thinks that the actual gun objects are the problem; it’s understood to be synecdoche.
I think responding to a literal interpretation of someone else’s words as if that’s what they meant as a way to criticize the way they expressed their point is more damaging to the discourse because it’s a bad faith response.
Consider: just having the gun makes it an option in the mind of its possessor. I think most people are usually about themselves and their faculties enough to not resort to it. But we’re only humans.
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.
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.
Absolutely.
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.
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.
If he had a spoon instead of a gun, would the kid still have been shot?
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.
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.
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.
How do you feel about the forced reset trigger?
Sounds fun
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.
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
If you keep getting shit on, maybe stop acting like a toilet. Idk man every other country in the world figured it out, the US isn’t as special as you’re all taught it is. I’m all about sensible gun controls as well.
Copy pasted for I think the seventh 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
So he probably shouldn’t have a gun then…
This asshole? Definitely not
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
It can be both
The problem is that an idiot with no brain cells was allowed to have a gun.
The problem is that gun companies have convinced half the population of a country that owning a gun is a “God given right” which is a fucking weird concept to begin with lol.
Exactly
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.
Do we have double the amount of murders per capita?
Gun deaths total, we come in at 9th place. (This is probably more correlated with poverty/wealth inequality though, which America also has in strides.)
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-related_death_rate
So first of all, no we don’t have double the murder rate, and secondly even looking specifically at “firearm related deaths” we aren’t even in the top 5? All that with 120 guns per 100 people, nearly double that of the next country (according to the above commenter).
Yes, there are multiple factors, just like basically everything in life. We’re not the absolute worst at one statistic, so there’s no problem right?
That stat obviously won’t scale linearly, because it’s not like every 1 person owns 1.2 guns. There are a few people who own like 50 guns, and that drives up the average.
If you’re cool being the only “first world” nation way up near the top of the gun death list though, I guess there’s probably no convincing you anyway.
I am when the murder rate is on par. It shows that without guns, people just murder with other means.
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.
Exactly, we should treating guns like cars. They should require revocable licenses, registration, training, and significant financial investment.
Not to mention liability insurance. Your gun harms/kills someone? You’ve got insurance to pay for it. Your gun stolen and used to harm someone? Prove it was securely stored or it goes on your insurance.
I’ve been arguing this for years
You do realise cars actually require a license to operate? You literally already have “car control”.
So what exactly is your agrument again?
Copy pasted for like the 5th time
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
Ok, let’s treat guns like cars and require a training period and license to use one.
Though I would probably treat it more like a forklift, because a gun is a lot more immediately dangerous if you make a mistake than a car, like a forklift. With a car, you usually have to be doing something wrong for a while before you’ll kill anyone. With a gun you just accidentally pull the trigger when it’s pointed at someone and you probably just ended a life.
100% agreement! I world have no problem being made to take the required classes and tests to qualify for my firearms like this, and anyone who refuses or fails has to turn their firearms over. 100% agreement. I think it would help these kinds of issues as well as public perception, so I wouldn’t have to argue this hard to stand up for the right to keep my family safe
Ok, it sounds like you’re a gun owning democrat like me.
Yes sir, liberal gun owner here! Nice to see another in the wild
No, no, you’re right there. Cars are a problem too. But that’s a different topic, we’re talking guns now.
Ah ok so any tool that can possibly harm you must be banned
Just go live in a padded cell and leave the rest of us alone
Who talked about banning cars? Don’t put words in my mouth and don’t be so rude.
Cars are a source of different problems: pollution, traffic congestion, lack of space in cities due to parking needs… and accidents too, yes. All of these issues can be solved with his public transport, and 95% car rides can be replaced by public transport (unless I’m transporting the furniture I just bought back to my house).
There’s no need to go live in a padded cell (although if you wish to, be my guest), just stop whining online and look for solutions instead.
Read the post again, you got everything backwards lol
Nice red herring. What does this have to do with the fact that there are TWICE as many guns per person in America than the next highest country? Doesn’t that tell you that maybe we have influenced too much gun culture in our society and made it too easy for people to obtain without proper vetting and safety regulations?
Copy pasted from a reply to some other asshat
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
Maybe don’t start off your argument with calling someone an asshat then 🤷♂️
I’m not anti gun, btw. I own a shotgun and know how to use it. My state recently passed a ban on semi-automatic assault weapons that I voted in favor of. But go ahead and keep insulting those who disagree with you and assuming they’re ‘rabid anti gun.’
Americans have all sorts of mental health issues that are completely undiagnosed and many of them are dealing with their unchecked emotions by waltzing into a Sportsman’s Warehouse and back out with a cart of weapons after signing some waivers and shooting up places with large gatherings of people.
I don’t even understand how people argue against this shit. It’s been happening for far too long, getting much worse, and America is basically alone on top of this shit mountain we’ve built for ourselves.
Copy pasted from another reply
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
So you’re not here to actually discuss the issue. Got it.
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I live in a bad neighborhood and have had to defend my family against fucking armed meth heads trying to break into my house and harm my wife and son. The police are completely useless. I am a cripple and can’t fight. If I didn’t have a gun we’d all be dead by now.
If you try to take the guns away in this country, you’ll take them from law abiding folks like myself that use them for self defense but not the criminals we need to defend ourselves from
Maybe if we had real police that actually protect and serve we could be in the same page. As long as the police are worse than useless and every junkie criminal has a gun, the rest of us need one too
You think I want to raise my kid in a world where everybody is armed?!? Fuck no! This sucks! It’s better than being dead though. That’s the alternative. If you’ve had the privilege to live your life in safe areas that’s great! Not everybody does.
Huh … because of guns? You need guns because other people have guns?
So if there were no guns … you wouldn’t need a gun?
As someone from a country with sane gun control. Not once in my entire life have I wished to have a gun to defend myself with against other people.
I don’t even live in a “good” area. But because guns aren’t exactly legal, there are very few guns around at all.
This is an entirely workable solution as almost every other western country has demonstrated. America is just obsessed with owning (to use your words) “tools” to murder each other with.
You know what happens when guns are actually restricted? They become difficult to get for everyone. Going by the logic “banning guns means only criminals have guns”, do you ever wonder why other countries don’t have a huge crimimal-gun-problem? Because its a myth perpetuated by gun nuts.
The average person in modern society should have no reason to own a gun.
America is just psychotic
Try to follow along. You can’t take the guns away from the criminals in this country. There are more guns than people. We are not an island. We are literally swimming in guns. I don’t like it, but if you try to take them away YOU WON’T TAKE THEM AWAY FROM THE METH HEADS you will only make it harder for law abiding citizens to defend themselves
If you could magically get rid of all the guns, sure! Let me know when you figure that out
Circular logic as always.
Yeah none of what you just said makes it not a gun problem lmao.
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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.