This doesn’t strike me as indicative of a temper problem. Needlessly confrontational, yes, but he didn’t seem upset in the video, and I have every reason to believe he hatched this plan with a calm mind.
It was just a dumb plan. He’d have the same effect if he had just hidden the laptop or sold it without coming across to his daughter as unreasonable.
Yes, I was, and this guy seems nothing at all like my folks. He very calmly expressed his disappointment and anger, explained why there would be consequences, and enacted those consequences in a rather over-the-top way that was probably intended for humorous effect, but in no way demonstrated a loss of temper. For people that view this guy as an out-of-control lunatic, I have to ask - have you actually ever seen someone lose control? Seen all the blood rush to their face, their eyes glaze over, their body start shaking until they are just smashing and screaming and smashing and screaming, leaving a trail of destruction in their wake without regard to what or who is in their path? This was not that.
I also think one’s opinion on this is probably shaped by their experience with guns. For many people, guns represent violence and nothing else. For many other people and probably the household in question, guns represent recreation, family time, heritage, something to do. They aren’t automatically inundated with threatening connotations. If he’d driven over the laptop with a four-wheeler I doubt people would be reacting so strongly.
Once I kept leaving needles all over my waterbed, so my mother got rid of my waterbed. I knew damned well why I was losing it and had been warned time and time again. I just came home and it was gone. I didn’t bitch about it and it was certainly less traumatizing than having the shit slapped out of me.
Yeah, he was totally able to be calm on the video and in text, but I don’t see how that changes things much. I’m sure there’s a psychological difference witnessing it, but I don’t see how doing a ridiculous thing in a calm frame of mind makes it suddenly okay. Didn’t he say in the follow up that she paid for the laptop herself? Publicly destroying your kid’s belongings is utterly childish behavior no matter how little your voice shakes when you do it.
You’re right; I take it back.
Too bad two bullets didn’t ricochet into each of his eyeballs.
I would say there is a pretty big difference. When a parent loses their temper, there’s always the threat of severe bodily harm or death. You don’t get PTSD from watching a video of your Dad shooting your laptop.
I don’t believe parents have to be violent in order to be abusive, but I don’t think this guy seems controlling at all. She has some chores and she’s expected to be respectful to her parents, and horrors! she’s been grounded in the past for three whole months. Also, she wasn’t even particularly upset by this event, which should tell you a lot about what a meanie her father is.
I also don’t see this as a violation of privacy, at all. I don’t think anything on the internet should have any expectation of privacy, especially if you’re a minor. If she’d written in her diary it would be a different story.
Someone crazy enough to shoot a gun into a laptop for punishment of a private rant doesn’t strike me as someone who’d simply ask for coffee while the other person’s up. You’re going to say that I don’t know the situation, well, neither do you, so my version of the facts are as correct as yours. I think whenever he wants a coffee, he pounds on her door (if her room even has any) and tells her to go fetch some, or brew it if there’s none left. He makes her use an old fashioned hoe to dig the soil for the fertilizers, and expects only her to do all the household chores because she’s a girl. I doubt her brothers do anything more than play sports and go hunting.
You obviously had it tough. Its nice that you look back fondly on those memories, but doing that on a regular basis at that age is a terrible way to spend a childhood. What kid is told to earn money at 8 to buy a bike, seriously? Your parents should have been providing those for you.
Look, no one is saying every instance of kids doing chores is bad. Anne Frank hid out for years from death from Nazis and she turned into a fine little writer. But you’d be crazy to think that its normal, or preferred, to get into writing that way. This girl obviously felt it was too much, and given that the dad went apeshit and blew away her property, something he expects her to pay for, its not a stretch to consider him a lunatic
And you’d be right if this was simply about him owning a gun. Alas, its more about what he did with the gun. THAT is what makes him a dangerous crazy person
Needlessly destroying an expensive computer equipment is not a rational form of punishment. That would be like if a child is a picky eater, the parents refuse him all food until he passes out from starvation. Or if the daughter sleeps around, the dad molests her. The correct form of punishment, if he even needed to punish her, was to take away her laptop for a period of time. That he would waste hundreds, possibly thousands of dollars, take the time to rant in an empty field and shoot a video and put it online makes him a psycho.
At any time during the whole discovery of the kid’s venting and the subsequent planning, driving out to the field, loading the gun, making the angry retort, and filming and posting the thing he could have stopped and realized what he’s doing is crazy. This is not a rational man, nor was he simply caught up in the heat of the moment. This was a calculated decision by a nut to control her
His own words belie that assumption:
How mad do you have to be for your hands to shake involuntarily? The fact that he didn’t capture that on video doesn’t mean he wasn’t pissed off. And crying too? This is a man who cannot control himself
So if you had come home and found that she slashed up your waterbed, letting the water out and ruined the floor, and expected you to pay for it, you would have been ok with that too?
It’s kinda hilarious to say that destroying a laptop is like starving or molesting a child, and then assert that he’s a pyscho.
It’s perfectly rational to destroy the laptop, if it’s not a significant loss to him. If after repeated requests to turn her music down he broke a CD, would you think that was “psycho”?
No, you don’t like guns and you over-identify with teenagers. It’s okay, but it doesn’t make that guy psycho.
Dad left something out. When she said she wouldn’t be there when they’re old he should have pointed out that her inheritance wouldn’t be there either.
Would have found something more entertaining for the laptop like maybe an industrial shredder. But with that said her phone would make an excellent clay pigeon…
Well, that is much better thank you.
She can live without any inheritance, assuming there would be any. Being left to rot in a nursing home with no visitors is a lot worse. Or just not seeing your daughter for 30, 40 years after she moves across the country without leaving her address or phone number.
[QUOTE=dude’s facebook page]
We agreed we learned two collective lessons from this so far:
First: As her father, I’ll definitely do what I say I will, both positive and negative and she can depend on that. She no longer has any doubt about that.
Second: We have always told her what you put online can affect you forever. Years later a single Facebook/MySpace/Twitter comment can affect her eligibility for a good job and can even get her fired from a job she already has. She’s seen first-hand through this video the worst possible scenario that can happen. One post, made by her Dad, will probably follow him the rest of his life; just like those mean things she said on Facebook will stick with the people her words hurt for a long time to come. Once you put it out there, you can’t take it back, so think carefully before you use the internet to broadcast your thoughts and feelings.
[/QUOTE]
I’m guessing the reason he shot the laptop is because the last time she did something similar to this he grounded her and said “next time I’m shooting your laptop.” So she continued to post nasty, spoiled-brat type things on the internet, which makes her look bad and is un-erasable, and he kept his word. I think the video was unnecessary and at least should have been more concise, but he doesn’t seem like a bad parent to me.
This is obviously a very polarizing subject, and I think everyone’s perspective is going to be grounded in their own experiences. I think context is everything, and I’m comfortable with what little context we have here, in saying that while his actions were over the top, he wasn’t in any way being cruel, out of control or endangering his child.
Holy crap, this thread should be re-titled “Mommy Never Loved Me… You’re Soaking In It.”
That made my day. This guy WORKED his way through life. I’m sure he’ll have no problem retiring comfortably.
His daughter on the other hand can’t be bothered with the most trivial of chores. Her work ethic at this point suggests that Dad will be willing to buy her the plane ticket that moves her across the country without a forwarding address.
Assuming he doesn’t shoot himself and her. And assuming he would ever have left her anything in the first place. And plenty of people WORK through life and die with nothing.
I’ve read the thread.
I’ve read parts of the thread to the kid.
Then reminded her that we’re doing chores today. Lots of them.
And told her to make me a cup of coffee.
We both think the PC getting shot for a second offense is hysterically funny.
And I’m getting a cup of coffee.
If you read what I actually said, I got the bike at 8 for Christmas, I bought my second ‘grownup’ bike at 16. [a rather nice Schwinn Varsity in burgundy. My previous bike was also a schwinn, the kind that doesn’t have the cross bar, what my brother at the time called a girly bike. ]
And what the hell is difficult about being told to weed a damned garden if I am going to eat the veggies produced? Have you ever weeded a garden? If you do it every couple of days, and your brother is helping you it goes quickly. Letting the weeds get out of hand makes it harder. And the horrors of being asked to grab a coffee or water for someone when I was headed to the kitchen anyway, I may never be the same again. I must obviously be suffering PTSD.:rolleyes: I even had to <sob> make my own bed, do my own laundry starting at 10 and even help with the dishes and cleaning house.
Be real, right now she is growing up into the perfect little entitlement whore. Maybe she can learn to be a real human instead.
I have; both as a kid and in my 30s in fact. Hot, dirty, uncomfortable, and tedious; its main effect was to convince me I never wanted a garden.
The way in which it was destroyed and the cost of the item speaks to his psychosis.
If he were Bill Gates, I don’t think destroying something worth a few hundred or thousand dollars would be much. But most families, even upper middle class ones, aren’t in the habit of breaking something that costs hundreds or thousands of dollars to teach a lesson.
Plus, he shot it. If she got a speeding ticket, it would be nuts if he poured gasoline on it and set it on fire, or released the brakes and rolled it into a lake or off a cliff. The point is there is much better, effective, easier, and less costly ways of punishing her but he chose a deliberately violent, permanent, and idiotic way to do it. If he had just taken it away, it wouldn’t have been nuts. But his meticulous planning setting all of that up and leaving video evidence in which he uses to taunt his own daughter speaks to a truly messed up mind
Oops
Weeding a garden a few times is fine, but I got the impression it wasn’t just a few times. If I had been told to weed the garden weekly for years beginning at 8 years old, with no breaks due to sickness or weather, it would have been cruel. You don’t provide the context, so I’m going to assume the worst just as you assume the best of this dad
Having to get up at 5am in the morning to make coffee for your lazy dad when you have school at 8 or 9 is mean. Having to do it daily because he’s too stupid to work the coffee machine or lazy to grind the beans themselves is cruel. Having to be forced outside in snowy weather to forage for coffee beans so that your dad could drink a cup and dump the rest down the drain is abusive and psychotic. Again, you want to assume things, then so will I.
Let it be known that on February 10, 2012, the meaning of the word “entitlement” changed to “complaining about being forced to do an unreasonable amount of chores as a minor while the family has a maid and while still technically doing the chores. specifically, the definition refers to the act of complaining, since that is what the punishment was for”