title:  Responsible Gun Owner Shoots Himself After ‘Accidentally’ Killing Friend (VIDEO)
text: On the night of January 7, 2016,  responsible gun owner  Justin Lowrie decided to skip the AA meeting he was scheduled to attend, so he could get drunk with friends.According to the Leader-Telegram, Lowrie was  experienced with firearms.  The 32-year-old alcoholic had been given a concealed carry permit by the state of Wisconsin two months before. The permit made it perfectly legal for Lowrie to take his 9 mm handgun to a drinking party.Around 10:30 pm, as the party was winding down, Lowrie and a group of friends were gathered in an apartment building in Rice Lake. He was holding his handgun.Two friends, Laura Polichnia and Cheri Fullarton, were standing  arm-in-arm  nearby. That s when Lowrie  accidentally  shot Fullarton in the face, killing her.Melissa Leland, a resident of the apartment building where the shooting took place, described the scene to WQOW. We heard a gunshot and all of a sudden people just started screaming and crying and after a couple of minutes went by, I went out of my apartment and checked to see what the heck was going on. One of my neighbors just came running at me crying,  He shot her. He shot her.' Someone from the apartment complex called 911. Before authorities arrived at the scene, Lowrie left the apartment where the group had been gathered. He returned to his own apartment, located two doors away from the apartment where Fullarton was shot.That s where he put the gun to his own head, pulling the trigger and ending his own life in a moment of drunken despair.The Leader-Telegram describes Lowrie as  a man with a troubled past and a drinking problem.  During an interview here, Lowrie s father said his son had been  troubled  due to his wife leaving him and his mother dying of cancer in 2014.The NRA says that everyone has the right to own a gun, regardless of mental and emotional health. Any attempt to prevent a tragedy like this is portrayed as an evil liberal plot to take their guns away and put them in FEMA camps or something equally as ignorant.Cheri Fullarton was a 37-year-old mother of three.During an interview with the Leader-Telegram, her brother, Roger Miller, said the family is struggling to deal with the loss. We try and remember how she loved her children, was pretty and intelligent,  he said. We re just mad as hell about how he was screwing around with a gun, even if he thought it was unloaded. Lowrie s distraught father told the Leader-Telegram, All I know is that Justin made the choices that he did in a drunken state and he s not here for me to ask why. During the same interview, Justin Lowrie s dad also said, I believe the Lord is going to save other people through this. We all wish he could take it back, but he can t; we don t get do-overs, but we can acknowledge the things that have happened and learn from them  to make better choices. Maybe this will change someone else s life. That would be great. But the gun-totin Jesus of right-wing Christian fantasy would never allow such a thing to happen.Here s more on this story from WQOW.WQOW TV: Eau Claire, WI NEWS18 News, Weather, and SportsFeatured image credit: Alice Taylor via Flckr cc 2.0