A Minnesota woman has been charged with second degree manslaughter this week after fatally shooting her boyfriend in the chest with a 50-calibre Desert Eagle handgun. Monalisa Perez and Pedro Ruiz wanted to be YouTube stars, and in a bid to increase viewership of their channel about being teen parents had conceived a stunt where Ruiz would stop a bullet with an encyclopedia held to his chest. Perez had posted on social media earlier in the day that it was her boyfriend's idea, but of course there's nothing in the posting to suggest she had doubts the crazy idea would work. Firing from a foot away, Perez ventilated her boyfriend as their three-year-old child and thirty neighbors watched.

The couple should have read the encyclopedia instead of shooting it. If they had turned to the entry marked “handguns,” they'd have learned that a 50-calibre Desert Eagle is about as powerful as a sidearm gets, and its round will go through a refrigerator. Turn past the handgun part and there's an entry on “hearts,” which explains that because it's one of the body's primary organs and people generally can't live without an intact one, any stunt that puts it at risk is idiotic by definition. And beyond that section there's the entry “hubris,” which would be defined as excessive self confidence, often leading to one looking like an ignoramus. In this instance a dead one. Yes, we know it's not really a joking matter. But we aren't joking—there's real value in reading, and we highly recommend it.