A Florida father is mourning the loss of his teenage son, who was killed in a freak accident at a gun range this weekend. Clayton Brumby had taken his 12-year-old daughter, 24-year-old son, and 14-year-old son Stephen to a gun range for target practice on Sunday, as he apparently did with all seven of his children at least once a month.
As Brumby fired a round at a target, the hot shell casing apparently bounced off the wall and went down the back of his shirt. Using the hand the gun was in, Brumby attempted to fish the casing out of his shirt, but the gun went off, firing into the ceiling before ricocheting down, killing Stephen. But despite the tragedy, Brumby has no plans to get rid of his guns, which he keeps in the family home for security reasons. He tells CNN, “It doesn’t take but a split second for something to go wrong and that could be [the case] with a gun, it could be with the wrong medicine, it could be with any number of things.”
“The gun didn’t kill my boy. I did,” he told CNN. “Every round in the gun is your responsibility. When it fires you need to stand to account for it it. That’s what I’ve spent the last two days doing, accounting for my operating error.”
While many people believe that a gun is the complete responsibility of the owner, it’s unlikely that everyone will agree on who or what killed the boy. That’s simply a reality of the ongoing, heated discussion surrounding the topic of gun control. But either way, this was a tragedy nonetheless. As of now Brumby has not been charged in the death of his son, and a memorial fund has been set up on GoFundMe in Stephen’s memory, which raised more than $20,000 of its $10,000 goal in less than 24 hours.
(Via CNN)