The man was Florida youth pastor Melvyn Nurse, and the year was 1998. When you sin, he told his congregation of 250, you're playing Russian roulette, courting great danger. And to illustrate this, he inserted a round into a revolver, spun the cylinder, lifted the gun to his head, and fired.Â
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"So wait," you might think, "the guy was counting on the five out of six chance that the chamber would be empty when he pulled the trigger?" No, no. See, Melvyn loaded the gun with a blank (and possibly with additional blanks beforehand). So when the gun fired, it would wow the church with a loud noise, but he would be perfectly safe!
Only, no, that's not how blanks work. Yeah, a blank doesn't have a hunk of lead and gunpowder, but even if it's just a roll of cardboard, it's still hitting you with lots of force if you hold the gun right up to yourself. Heck, guns that fire nothing but air can kill you if they fire with enough force right at your head. The blank knocked pieces of Melvyn's skull into his brain, and the 35-year-old died five days later in the hospital.Â
Melvyn, despite technically being a Florida man, was otherwise not what you'd call a gun nut. He'd urged teens to stay away from guns and told parents to keep guns away from their kids. The demonstration in fact aimed to (among other things) warn kids about the dangers of guns, and in this, it succeeded more than the man had anticipated. One teen following the sermon turned over his own gun to his parents.Â
We could say that the lesson here is that blanks are dangerous. But since you might go your whole life without loading a gun with blanks to play Russian roulette, we'll instead default to rule number one of owning a gun: Never point your gun at anyone unless you are willing to kill them. That even goes for unloaded guns (you must operate under the assumption that even an unloaded gun might in fact be loaded). "Threaten" someone with a gun only if you are willing to kill them, and do not point a gun jokingly at someone at all. The only reason to point a gun at someone if you aren't willing to kill them is if you're an actor doing a scene, and surely no one would ever use a real gun for that, no way.Â