According to the Press Herald, M. D. Harmon, a right wing columnist who often wrote in support of gun rights for the newspaper, died Wednesday after being accidentally shot by a teenage boy.

Harmon, who was 71-years-old, was showing off his collection of guns to a 16-year-old boy in his home in Sanford, Maine. He let the teen hold the gun when it accidentally went off.

The teenager was with his father visiting Harmon at the time. Harmon’s wife described the incident as an “accidental tragedy.”

Harmon was an avid gun rights supporter and often criticized attempts to regulate firearms or even pass legislation to that attempted to make guns safer.

In 2013, Harmon criticized a proposed law in Maine that would have enforced gun owners to take a gun safety course, even called that part of the legislation “the worst part of the bill.”

“So much for ‘the right of the people to keep and bear arms,” he wrote. “It’s one thing to have the government create limited groups of people not entitled to own firearms for good reasons — felons, the insane, children, etc. — and quite another to have the government think it can require that a free people get official permits to exercise their rights!”

He also attacked President Barack Obama for pushing gun control “fatwas” that tried to prohibit people from buying guns at gun shows without a background check.