I love a good prank. There are a bunch of shows that are dedicated to this sort of thing like Punkd and if we want to get really old school Candid Camera was a real winner that I barely remember because I was so young.
I have engaged in pranks on friends in the past and they were mostly harmless and even the victims found it to be really funny.
There is a wonderful French-Canadian prank show with shorts that don't need language in order to be understood that is called Just For Laughs Gags that is also a lot of fun.
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As funny as all of these things are, I'm quite certain that they had some security nearby in case people got upset and potentially violent before it was revealed that things were just pranks. YouTube is filled with pranks gone wrong where the perpetrators were attacked and beaten. The ones that involved scary things like ghosts or hammer-wielding killer clowns would never work very well in a state like Texas where a great deal of the population is armed and allowed to kill someone who attacks them with a deadly weapon, even if it later turns out that said deadly weapon wasn't actually real.
A recent attempt at a prank ended in tragedy and it was a really stupid prank to begin with that just makes you wonder the mentality of the person involved and why he ever thought this would be funny in the first place.
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John Whitley owns a gun store in South Carolina and he thought it would be a funny prank to put a BB gun in with the real handguns on display when his friend came by for a chat, as Stefan Mrgan frequently would do. They were both gun enthusiasts and were friends outside of the shop. The idea of the prank was that Whitley was going to pull out a Glock replica BB gun handgun mid conversation and shoot his friend with it but somehow he managed to instead pull out a real one, shoot his friend in the face, and killed him instantly.
This is an extremely dumb prank, especially since it was done by the owner of a gun store that one would imagine would be extremely well versed in the proper storage and handling of firearms not to mention the fact that you would never leave a loaded weapon in a display case anyway. I am not familiar with the laws of South Carolina, but it seems to me that all guns in a gun store would need to be stored unloaded.
I have only been shooting a few times in my life but when I did go the people that I was there with, most of which were military personnel, were absolutely adamant that you never muzzle someone even if you know the gun is unloaded. The only time you point a gun at someone is if you intend to shoot to kill.
This level of ignorance is something that you might expect from a street thug, but not from someone who has gone through the licensing process to have a gun store that is probably very complicated.
John Whitley is now charged with involuntary manslaughter and oddly enough, wasn't even arrested when the police arrived at the scene. He has been released on a very low bond.
To me, there are certain things that you really should never involve in a prank and something that involves even a replica of something that can cause death is one of those things that should be off limits. Whitley should have known better. I would imagine that it is very unlikely that he will do any hard time for this but the sheer idiocy of this event is so tragic I hope it haunts him to the end of his days.
