Here’s yet more proof of why it’s not smart to mix drunk idiots and guns.

A 47-year-old man who was shot in the head Wednesday night during an exchange about whether he could smoke inside a friend’s house died Thursday afternoon, authorities said.

Robert Williams was pronounced dead at 3:10 p.m. at John Peter Smith Hospital.

Margore Carter, 49, was arrested Thursday evening by members of the U.S. Marshal’s Task Force at a relative’s home in Arlington, police said. She faces a murder charge.
…
A witness said that “the suspect then jokingly stated that she had something that would make him go outside,” Boetcher said.

Carter went to her bedroom and returned with a gun, investigators said.

Acting Sgt. Mike Carroll said she first aimed the gun at a window near Williams and pulled the trigger. The gun just clicked.

“From the other witnesses’ statements, they all thought she was kind of playing around,” Carroll said. “She then walks up to him, puts it to his head and pulls the trigger, and it does go off.

“According to her, she was surprised.”

There are two things I don’t accept as excuses when it comes to ND’s:  a) It just went off; and, b) It was unloaded.  I *always* follow the rule that a gun is loaded unless I’m doing something that specifically calls for it to be unloaded (such as cleaning).  I even recheck if it’s left my hand since I last checked.

I can’t abide a shooter who, upon being called out for bad gun handling behavior, tries to excuse it by saying that it isn’t loaded.  It’s really not very hard to maintain safe habits, and excuses are rather poor comfort when your neighbor is lying dead on his floor, stuck down like a bolt from the blue by *your* “oops.” 

And the “it just went off” excuse is utter crapola.  Barring mechanical malfunction (which is very rare and still requires violation of the three rules to cause harm), guns require some kind of human input to fire.  As someone so eloquently stated somewhere that I can’t remember, “Keep your booger hook off the bang switch!”

Anyhow, this idiot (enhanced by alcohol), willfully violated all three rules, resulting in the death of another person.  Let’s hope she gets plenty of time in the gray-bar hotel to contemplate her errors.