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I would be surprised if any of you hadn't already seen this video of the dad who shoots a few rounds into his daughter's laptop because she posted a snarky letter bitching about her parents on her Facebook. The video showed up on my Facebook newsfeed many times today. Most of my friends posted it so they could give Dad an attaboy for showing his daughter who's the boss. Only a couple of friends, both chronic homeschoolers, thought Dad was a total, fucking asshole in an ugly hat could have found a better way to deal with his daughter's angry letter and his own anger in response.
I've raised a couple of teenagers into adulthood. Drake was difficult in his own way, but Elvira pushed every button I had and some that probably belonged to the neighbors. She admits she did it on purpose. Oh, I have so many stories; I understand the frustration this guy felt. Tempting as it was to get her back by behaving just like her though, to get revenge on the low road, that's not what reasonable adults do. That's not how good parents teach their kids to control their impulses and consider the consequences of their actions, a lesson this girl obviously needs.
I've never understood parents who think they can teach their kids to stop a behavior by doing it back to them, only worse or harder. One reason I hate going to K-mart is because inevitably my ears are assaulted by the sound of some piece of shit smacking her kid and yelling, "Don't hit your brother! Next time I'm gonna hit you harder!" What kind of fucking inbred idiot thinks that will work? The lesson is not "don't hit your brother." The lesson is "when you get mad, hit people, but only if you're lots bigger than they are and can hurt them worse." It's fucked up, and it ensures a next generations of hitters.
So this dad, furious that his daughter wrote a nasty letter and posted it online, taught her a lesson: he ramped it up, made an 8-minute video of himself reading and responding to her letter and then fired his pistol into her laptop. Wow. He really showed her, didn't he? Take that, you whiny little bitch. If she thought she was mad, now she knows he can get madder. And when he does, he will fuck her world up. In public. The lesson she'll really get from it? She obviously needs to be sneakier. That's what I would have done.
Not only did he read her letter and then go completely over the top by responding in public, his response, provoked though it was by that maddening letter, took words and added both visuals and gun violence. I find that kind of behavior pretty scary. I'm not sure why other people don't, because isn't the message here that he can do to her what he did to her laptop? That is the message, right? The laptop was standing in for her? Way to go, Dad.
The bottom line is that this asshole indulged himself in an enraged, premeditated temper tantrum. He's like a three-year-old with a gun. And I want to reiterate: I do understand his frustration. I have bad-mommy stories from when Elvira was a teen. I'm not proud of them. I also understand the impulse to cheer for a dad who'd had enough and set some boundaries. But I can't imagine shooting my daughter's possessions with a 44 while videotaping myself and then sharing it with the whole fucking world. I guess they do things different in Texas, but here in the Midwest, CPS might be knocking on my door. His reaction was extreme and violent and childish. And we all know children shouldn't play with guns.
This isn't the kind of behavior we're supposed to be teaching our kids--and they will copy what we model for them. This isn't how we want them to behave when they're adults--do we? Most of us teach our kids not to lash out with violence when they're angry, not to respond to aggression with an escalation of more
