Daddies with guns

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 generation 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 45 while videotaping myself and then sharing it with the whole fucking world. I guess they do things different in Texas North Carolina, 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 aggression. That's how wars start. That's how daughters leave home and never speak to their dads again. That's how daughters learn that it's OK for the men in their lives to respond with violence when they get mad. Some people have even said the daughter will become a stripper because of this. I think it’s a little early to tell.

Not only that, his reaction got his daughter a lot more attention than her letter to her Facebook friends ever would have. He had to show everybody his big dick, so now she's infamous for her letter, which otherwise would have scrolled off every friend's newsfeed within hours. I would have loved that when I was a teen! Instead of just telling her to take the letter down, and then maybe talking to her calmly about how her letter had angered him and her mom -- maybe even talking to her about why she wrote it -- this guy made a stupid, whiny letter from a teenager into a circus. And he's the scary fucking clown.

Maybe our first instinct when we get angry or feel threatened is to get angrier, threaten with bigger guns. But as parents, this isn't the model we should set for our kids. This dad is not a caveman and the person threatening him wasn't a saber-tooth tiger. A little civility would have gone a long way toward teaching his daughter there are better ways to handle her anger. What did she learn from this? If somebody makes you mad, set up your camera, get out your pistol, and show the world your dick is big enough to drill holes into a kid's laptop. Now that's masterful parenting.

I already know a significant number of my readers disagree with me about this video. I'd love to hear from you. Do you really consider this an example of effective parenting? Or is it a knee-jerk reaction to take the dad's side because the daughter was such a whiny bitch?