Yazmin Esmeralda Mexican teen girl accidentally shoots self dead with Uzi gun during filming of TikTok video while visiting grandmother’s house.
A 15 year old teen girl in Mexico has died after ‘accidentally’ shooting herself with a submachine gun while trying to record a TikTok video with her brother.
Yazmin Esmeralda, fatally fired a 9-millimeter Uzi after discovering it at the bottom of a bedroom closet during a family stay with her grandmother last month in the small town of Guasave, Sinaloa.
She was immediately killed by the shot with the sound of gunfire awakening her mother, local news reported.
While it remained unclear how the weapon came to be in the home or why it suddenly went off, Esmeralda had asked her younger brother to film a video of her holding the gun so she could upload the footage to the TikTok app.
Experts believe the teen was inspired to pick up the weapon as a result of the country’s rampant drug culture and the adulation the industry bestows from poorer members of society seeking to rise above their poverty, according to Vice.
15-Year-Old Girl Kills Herself With an Uzi Trying to Record a TikTok Video
The accident shows the increasing attraction of the narco lifestyle to young people in Sinaloa, home to the legendary drug cartel. https://t.co/DJIjbjHNfk— CyberSurfer2050 (@2050CyberSurfer) February 23, 2022
Adulation of drug trafficking underworld
Officials in the region fear the fatal incident was inspired by the nation’s ongoing history of drug trafficking as Sinaloa was previously the homebase for notorious, now incarcerated narcotics lord Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán.
‘That she chose to record a clip [in that way] shows that our youth is immersed in [drug cartel] culture,’ Sara Bruna Quiñonez Estrada, Sinaloa’s state prosecutor, told Vice. “It’s what they hear about at all hours.”
That message was reiterated by head of the state’s women’s ministry María Teresa Guerra Ochoa, who said, ‘There are sectors [of society] that admire drug traffickers.’
‘Many of them come from poverty and so they’re seen as symbols of success,’ she stated.
Quiñonez Estrada also pointed out that the gun in question is no longer used by the Mexican army, because of its complicated safety features and tendency for the weapon to go off haphazardly.
With guns being particularly difficult to be ‘legally’ acquired in Mexico with a stringent process involved, Mexico is awash with illegal weapons, often bought in US gun shops and smuggled illegally south across the border and into the hands of cartel members, according to Vice.
‘The fact that there were weapons in the house, that weren’t controlled, is the responsibility of the adults who knew there were children in the house,’ Estrada said.
@tiktok need to take more responsibility over what goes on their platform, I understand parents also need to support with that but ultimately it is their platform. Unless horrendous videos can be perminately prevented from being uploaded then your platform shouldn’t exist!
— Aaron Nalton 📚 Everything Handheld Blog 🎮 (@aaron_nalton) September 8, 2020
Uploading on TikTok as long as it doesn’t kill you
‘That she chose to record a clip [in that way] shows that our youth is immersed in that culture.
‘It’s what they hear about at all hours.’
Ultimately, she said that the family failed to protect a vulnerable teen.
‘The fact that there were weapons in the house, that weren’t controlled, is the responsibility of the adults who knew there were children in the house,’ she added.
TikTok has approximately 1 billion active users worldwide. Of these users, around 40 percent are between the ages of 14 to 24, with many of those users often seduced by the social media acclaim bestowed to influencers with large followings – with some willing to go to extremes to gain even more followers – even at their own peril.
