New Delhi, October 9
The Supreme Court has ruled that guns can’t be used to celebrate marriage functions and that these must be carried with a "sense of responsibility".

“Guns must be carried with a sense of responsibility and caution and are not meant to be used in places such as marriage ceremonies,” a Bench comprising Justices BS Chauhan and SA Bobde said in a verdict in a case of accidental firing at a wedding that resulted in the death of one person.

The Uttarakhand HC had sentenced Kunwar Pal to life imprisonment under Section 304, IPC (Part I), for causing the death of Ramayan Prasad in May 1998. A doctor at the Gadarpur Government Hospital had declared Prasad “brought dead”. “A person who goes to a holy ceremony with a double barrel (DBL) gun, which is used for killing animals, must be said to be going there with the intention to create a ruckus and to kill someone. Why was the DBL gun taken to the marriage ceremony? The obvious inference was that the same was carried to the ceremony to create wild disorder and to do some harm to some people,” the HC had held.

Rejecting this theory, the apex court said the high court had not taken into account “the practice in this part of the country to use guns while celebrating marriages in some communities. We must say at once that we do not mean to approve of this practice in any way”.

Nevertheless, merely carrying a gun “is not sufficient to attribute the intention to kill a particular person... It is not possible to agree with the HC that in the instant case the gun was carried to the marriage ceremony only to kill someone”, the apex court ruled.

“Though it is not possible to attribute intention, it is equally not possible to hold that the act was done without the knowledge that it is likely to cause death,” the SC said.