A teenage boy in India killed himself on Friday while he was taking a selfie with his father’s gun and pulled the trigger by accident. The 15-year-old boy, Ramandeep Singh, was taken to the hospital at Pathankot in the north Indian state of Punjab, after the incident, the local police said.
Deputy police superintendent of Punjab state, Manoj Kumar, said he was playing with his father’s licensed revolver, a .32 caliber pistol.
According to Kumar, the safety catch of the gun was not on when the teen took the picture, which is why he says that part of the blame goes to his father because he did not keep his loaded gun under lock and key at their house.
Not the first selfie-related death
This accident is the latest known so far of a series of incidents related to people trying to take dangerous selfies in India.
But India is not the only place where these unfortunate events are happening lately. The economics site Priceonomics gathered the existing statistics, from three years of news reports that indicate selfie-related deaths, about the people who have died while taking selfies.
According to the economics site, since 2014, 49 people had been reported dead because of an accident involving a selfie, and most of these deaths happened to 21-year-olds, being 75 percent male.
The most dangerous places to take a selfie, according to Priceonomics investigation, are high places or in water. 16 people have died from falling off a cliff or a tall building while 14 drowned, and 8 people have died from posing next to an oncoming. Some other reasons are gunshots, killing 4, grenades, which involves 2 deaths, plane crash, 2 deaths, car crash, 2 deaths, and animal, just one.
In India, however, is where most of the selfie-related deaths occur, having 40 percent of the total sample.
In January, one man drowned while trying to save a girl who fell into the sea while taking a selfie. This made the police in the western city of Mumbai to try to stop dangerous selfies. The police identified 16 dangerous selfie spots in Mumbai and declaring some areas “no-selfie zones” to prevent injuries.
A 20-year-old man, also in January, fell from on top of the Reasi fort in Jammu and Kashmir while taking a selfie. In February, a teenager tried to take a selfie in front of an oncoming train in the southern city of Chennai and was run over. Also, and in April, a man was seriously injured by an elephant when he tried to take a selfie with the animal at a festival in Kerala.
Source: BBC