Shotgun wedding

Well kiddo, a shotgun wedding is when two people have a wedding, but it's not because they want to. It happens because someone else, usually the father of the bride, has a shotgun, which is a scary gun that can make loud noises and hurt people, and forces them to get married. The reason this happens is because in the olden days, if a man got a lady pregnant before they were married, it was seen as a really bad thing. So, the father of the pregnant lady would sometimes use the shotgun to make sure the man who got her pregnant would take responsibility and marry her. Nowadays, we don't really use shotguns to force people to get married like that. Instead, people get married because they want to and because they love each other.