Guns are a lot of fun. Anyone who has been shooting can tell you that. It's an absolute blast--pun fully intended.

But not everything fun is a toy. Some things shouldn't be played around with and guns are at the top of that list. They should be enjoyed responsibly, and learning how to enjoy them responsibly needs to be part of everyone's education.

It's not, though.

And that's a problem. It's a problem because, for whatever reason, people get guns, play around with them, and then things like this happen.

A 16-year-old is dead following a night of “poor decision-making” by a group of teenagers, Texas deputies said. 

The teens, all 16 and 17 years old, were drinking alcohol while unsupervised at a Houston home at about 3:30 a.m., Nov. 25, when one pulled out a firearm and started to play with it, Harris County Sgt. Jason Brown said in a news conference posted by KHOU. He said the parents were “indisposed somewhere else.”

A 17-year-old was playing with the gun when it went off, Brown said, and a bullet struck his 16-year-old brother in the chest. 

The group attempted to save his life by performing first aid and they immediately called 911, according to Brown. When officers arrived on scene, the 16-year-old was dead.

The 17-year-old was taken into custody and will face charges.

Now, we don't know what these kids' backgrounds with firearms might be. They might have been properly trained in firearm safety only to ignore it all because kids can be stupid as it is and adding alcohol into the mix has never been known to make anyone more responsible.

What we do know is that these were kids who clearly shouldn't have had access to a firearm. I'd like to believe that they'd willfully given every indication they were responsible young adults and that's why they had access, but I'm not going to swear to it. The fact that they were drinking at someone's home with no adults around at 3:30 in the morning tends to suggest that this wasn't a home full of responsible parenting efforts.

And now, two lives have been destroyed.

One, of course, is the victim's, but the other is his brother. Yeah, he pulled the trigger, but all indications suggest that this wasn't intentional. That means this 17-year-old kid will have to spend the rest of his life knowing his mistake took his brother's life. He'll likely have his entire life destroyed because of this series of poor decisions.

I'm not saying to feel bad for him, necessarily, but this is one of those stories we should probably tell our own kids so they understand the importance of not being a freaking idiot and screwing around with guns, particularly while drinking but any time, really.

What I'd really like to do is never write about this kind of thing again, and not just because stories like this get used to justify mandatory storage laws and other bits of gun control. I'd like to never write about them again because I want them to end. We have enough horrors in this world as it is and we have them because mankind is flawed, leading some to choose a path in life that results in evil actions. We don't need horrors brought about by stupidity, carelessness, or negligence on top of those.