Texas Lawmaker Plans to Fight Celebratory Gunfire After Getting Shot in Head

Randomly firing guns into the air in celebration is something any reasonable person or responsible gun owner should oppose, but apparently people are doing it anyway. This weekend a bunch of Yosemite Sams decided to celebrate the new year by firing guns as though they were noisemakers. One of those situations ended in the death of a five-year-old girl, and another wound up with a Texas lawmaker actually taking a bullet to the head. He survived, though, and says he’s going to start the new year by investigating some legislative solutions to the problem of drunk assholes shooting guns into the air for fun.

According to The Texas Tribune, Texas sate representative Armando Martinez was hit in the top of the head by a bullet fired from some reveler’s gun on New Year’s Eve. He was celebrating with family when he says he felt something that felt like a sledgehammer hitting him over the top of his head. His wife saw a hole in the top of his skull and he was rushed to the hospital, where doctors found a bullet lodged in his skull.

Martinez is doing well after surgery and is expected to recover, though it was a very close call. Now he says that in the new year he intends to work on a bill to reduce or prevent “celebratory gunfire.”

Martinez says he’s not sure what the legislation will look like at the moment and he still needs to consult with the sheriff’s department and the district attorney to see what can and should be done. Martinez’s plan is in the nascent stage, but that is to be expected. The next legislative session does not start until January 10, and he did just get shot in the head two days ago. It will take a bit of time to create a bill more specific than just, “people shouldn’t be shooting guns into the air for fun.”

People know that bullets come down, right? Guns aren’t fireworks.

Still, people have been insisting on using them like noisemakers. Two days ago, the same day Martinez was shot, a five-year-old girl in Alabama was killed by a man who was shooting off celebratory gunfire for fun to celebrate the New Year.

According to Raw Story, the man was at a party on New Year’s and started firing his gun at the ground in celebration. One of the bullets accidentally hit a five-year-old girl at the party, and she died that night. The man was reportedly arrested later that day on charges of criminally negligent homicide, which Raw Story reports is a Class A misdemeanor.

Randomly firing a gun is an idiotic way to celebrate, and it’s actually already illegal in most cases. It’s also extraordinarily dangerous, because bullets come down. (This is not a thing we should have to tell people, but apparently it is news to some people.) Bullets might not come down on the shooter, but they’ll come down somewhere. One family in Kansas City was horrified to find their house hit with bullets from some assholes firing guns five blocks away. Mother Stephanie Swanson says her children were asleep in their beds when a bullet smashed through one of their home’s windows. What does a person even do in that situation? The kids are already in their beds, and bullets can come through walls or windows. Five blocks away someone was shooting a gun for shits and giggles, and one of her kids could have been killed.