People will do anything for fame. It’s especially true if wealth can be had as well. They’ll try almost anything to be adored by crowds, and they don’t always think things through.

Take the example of a woman who shot her boyfriend while he held an encyclopedia in front of him.

A Minnesota woman has pleaded guilty to fatally shooting her boyfriend in a videotaped stunt they planned to post on YouTube.

Monalisa Perez, 20, pleaded guilty last week to second-degree manslaughter in the June death of 22-year-old Pedro Ruiz III, The Star Tribune reported . Perez has two young children with Ruiz.

Perez told investigators that Ruiz wanted to make a video of her shooting a bullet into a hardcover encyclopedia he was holding against his chest, according to court records. Perez said she fired a .50-caliber Desert Eagle pistol from about a foot away. Two cameras recorded the incident, though investigators have withheld the footage. Ruiz died from a gunshot wound to the chest.

The couple had a YouTube channel where they posted videos of pranks and stunts. Hours before the shooting, Perez tweeted: “Me and Pedro are probably going to shoot one of the most dangerous videos ever. HIS idea not MINE.”

Perez deserves to be charged, of course, but she’s not the only one who bears some responsibility. Obviously, Ruiz does as well, but dead people can’t be charged. In this case, that’s a true pity, because the level of stupid it takes to think something like this is a good idea is downright criminal.

Both of these were fairly young people who were old enough to know better but didn’t.

Why didn’t they?

For one thing, I can’t help but believe that a lack of firearm education in schools may have been a contributing factor in this. While schools feel it’s their place to teach anything and everything else, there’s a lack of education on guns in schools that should also be considered criminal. Kids, particularly kids raised in urban environments, grow up without an understanding of firearms except in the movies.

There, guns are at once cannons that can literally blow someone’s head off yet offer so little penetration that a thin piece of wood offers total cover. Is it any wonder that Ruiz thought he’d survive his encounter?

But because gun education is unwelcome on school campuses, Ruiz is dead and Perez’s life is completely ruined.

Undoubtedly, there are those who will blame the gun and gun owners for this, but that’s just a case of reaching to try and prove a point. Literally no responsible gun owner thinks stuff like this is a good idea. Sure, it might be interesting to test, but none of us would risk this by doing it with a human holding the book. We’d do it in front of some ballistic gelatin or something.

No, this is on the people who prefer to keep people in the dark on guns. Keeping people stupid on a subject doesn’t keep them safe. It makes them dumb enough to think stuff like this is a good idea.