Spc. Patrick Myers will do time for fatally assuming the gun held blanks.
Spc. Patrick Edward Myers, a soldier from Fort Hood, Texas, pled guilty to involuntary manslaughter and was sentenced to three and a half years in military prison on Thursday. The Associated Press reports that he will also be demoted to private and will receive a “bad-conduct discharge” after his incarceration.
Myers admitted to accidentally shooting Pfc. Isaac Lawrence Young in September, 2012, while the pair were watching a football game at an apartment in Killeen. He told authorities he thought the gun was loaded with blanks and was trying to scare away Pfc. Young’s hiccups. The case was heard in the military court at Fort Hood because both the victim and the perpetrator were soldiers.
Photo: The Knowles Gallery/Flickr
I don’t buy it. First, theatrical blanks are not commonly available and do not resemble live ammunition. Any reasonable person who was going to play a prank would either have to load the gun with blanks or would at the least look at the ammunition loaded in the weapon and recognize the difference. Nobody would simply pick up a firearm they had not loaded themselves and assume it was loaded with blank ammunition. IMO this was a very disingenuous story meant to cover a willful homicide or a more egregiously negligent action that resulted in an accidental homicide.
Honestly, and this is just my own opinion, but honestly I agree with you! I don’t know a whole lot about ammunition, but from what I DO understand there is a noticeable difference between “live rounds” and “dummy rounds” and they do it that way on purpose so that things like this DON’T happen. And these weren’t random guys either, they are soldiers, who have been trained to use weapons and should know the difference… Also, I know that when my sister and her husband got their concealed weapons permits one of the “rules” their instructor drilled into their heads… Read more »
So? None of the articles said whether the cure worked or not. No more hiccups….