On a totally neither TeamDad or TeamHanna note, I really hope one of them saved that computer. That think could probably bring $20,000 easy on eBay right now, and the bullet hole spacing would be all that’s needed to authenticate it to any buyer.
Yes, QFT. I was kind of bratty as a teenager and it killed my parents (who have put me through extremely expensive schooling) to see me blow off homework and get bad-ish grades because I wouldn’t turn in papers (did fine on the tests & don’t worry, even brats grow up and do fine in college :)).
My dad has broken stuff, including some of my things (though he tended to destroy his own glasses in his anger), yelled and screamed. Yeah it sucked in the moment, but he also never laid a finger on me, my mom or my sister. At the end of the day I feel like disciplining your brat comes down to being a screamer or a spanker, and I’m totally content to have been raised by screamers and I can’t imagine calling them abusive.
All THAT said, my parents would not only have given away something as expensive as a laptop, knowing them, they would have forced ME to give it away to drive the point home. Also, I like that they’re mature enough to take the higher ground and keep our private stuff private. So I still think laptop gun dad is short-sighted and without discretion, both lessons he presumably wanted his daughter to learn.
That’s one way to teach the brat a valuable lesson - go, dad!
You could probably fund several months’ worth of Chantix from what you’d earn selling a laptop on eBay.
Hmmm… I hadn’t really thought about it from that perspective. Maybe that’s what the whole ‘post it on the Interwebz’ thing is all about.
my policy was a little different. Extra work on top of the required work. that way they learned the material and had an incentive to get it done right the first time.
my father would have done something far worse than shooting the laptop. He would have stopped talking to me.
I wouldn’t say I’m on “Team Dad” so much. Just that the daughter sounds like a whiny little brat. Even as she described them, her chores didn’t seem unreasonable and her expectation of payment for sweeping the floor was unbelievable. She came across as very poorly raised.
He came across as the person who did the really bad job of raising her. Taking the laptop from her is one thing. Shooting on camera was ridiculous and stupidly melodramatic (honestly, the littering before he pulled out the gun bothered me more than the shooting). The whole thing was just tacky.
More and more I find myself wondering how many people are defending him simply because he used a gun.
That Dad is a loon? That brute force and vandalism are acceptable ways to enforce your will?
It’s funny seeing people complaining that she doesn’t have a job when her father’s demonstrated his willingness to steal her stuff and destroy it. What’s the point in getting a job when someone can just grab whatever you buy with the money you get from it and destroy it? For that matter, I suspect he’s the kind of parent who’d consider himself to have the right to simply take whatever money she earns and spend it himself.
Another this that stuck in my craw about that video is the bit about “..I feed you, I clothe you, I put a roof over your head..”
He says that to the tune of: “I’m doing you a big f’n favor.”
No Dad, you are not. Feeding and clothing you child is an obligation. An obligation YOU CHOSE when you and your wife decided to have children.
Wait, he’s an IT professional and he put how much money into software to fix up her machine? I guess that opening an Internet browser and finding her Facebook account login is automatic makes anyone an expert.
Yeah, I was kind of wondering that myself. Unless he was upgrading the operating system, that doesn’t really make a lot of sense.
Another gun-toting, Jeebus loving’ unfit parent who can’t deal with technology. Awwwwww, did oooms feel embarrwassed 'cause your teen daughter feels rebeliwous??
Hope she called the cops. Hope he gets booked on illegal discharge of a weapon and a fucking restraining order. Hope one of her Facebbok friend’s parents punches the fucking cowpoke in the face, and I hope that’s at his church.
Guaranteed he and mom probably pulled a Texas-judge on her, cut themselves a decent switch, had it blessed by their preacher and commenced the whuppin’.
I can’t believe all the people acting like the kid did something so actionable. I was about as un-rebellious a teenager as any parent could hope for as far as anything like doing drugs/out all night/back talking/moodiness/etc., but even I trashed my parents to friends. Facebook didn’t exist then of course, and I wasn’t savvy enough to hack into ARPANET or whatever, but in person-to-person conversations and on the telephone and the bus and the like. I also wrote about my mother in my journal when I was 15 (my father being dead by the time) which she of course read (it happened to fall open to that page when she picked the lock, which she denied doing even though she quoted it damned near word for word), and I remember being furious about that invasion of my privacy. Thirty years later when I look back on it from an adult perspective, I still think it was a major uncalled for invasion of my privacy, and unless he had a legitimate reason to think she was doing drugs or in a sacrificial cult or whatever I think it was for him as well. (Does he not remember what hormones are doing to moods and attitudes at that age?)
And I’d go so far as to say let he or she among you who didn’t bitch about your parents to friends when you were a teenager cast the first hollow point. He even acknowledges she does most of her chores, she just bitches about them. As far as teen rebellion goes, on a scale where saying “Can I wait til after dinner to mop?” is a 1 and an earring without permission is a 5 and coming home pregnant by someone at a rave whose name you didn’t get is a 9 or whatever, bitching on Facebook is, maybe, a 3. His reaction is easily a 7.5.
Frankly, if my dad would have done something that when I was a kid, I probably would still not be talking to him. Now, don’t get me wrong, I was a bitchy little shit back in the day (I hold the record, I think, for being fired and re-hired from my parent’s little grocery store, largely for “going home and bitching about my boss” :D). My dad’s general solution was to lay shit out for me in clear terms (“If you don’t work for me, I don’t have any real reason to cover your car insurance, or for that matter even let you have a set of keys.” and the like) and put up with a moderate amount of griping as long as it wasn’t personal and wasn’t over the top. I have a very good relationship with my dad.
The dad in the video was an attention-whoring fool who is entirely too cavalier with his firearms, at best. And let’s face it, between the voice and the outfit, he comes across like the kind of guy who fantasizes about having sex with Toby Keith’s tour bus.
Abusive? No. Idiotic and counterproductive? Yes. As others have said, more or less–the solution to someone thinking you are a tyrant is rarely even more tyrannical behavior. PunditLisa’s anecdote (which I support) is like night and day with this video–the kid isn’t so far as we know screwing up her life, or really doing anything but some complaining about how hard being a 15-yr-old is. That’s the one age you actually get to unleash your inner ungrateful shit, for god’s sake.
Bullshit, Dad, bullshit. I actually did go to college at age 15 and the hoops I had to go through to be allowed on campus were amazing. One of the things I had to prove to the college was that I was not working in part-time employment, because they were concerned that someone my age wouldn’t be able to handle both. And you worked two jobs while doing that and being a volunteer fireman? Well, hell, why didn’t you tell us all about being an astronaut and a cowboy, too?
Makes me wonder what else this guy has made up. If he thought he could get away with those outrageous lies, there’s got to be more lying beneath the surface.
I have a feeling that the death of Whitney Houston media saturation gamechanger
has this guy saying to media calls “No, I don’t want attention and I will not go on shows or talk about this any further with… where y’all going? Uh, guys? Hey, come back… alright I’ll go on talk shows… COME BACKKKKK!”
Clown college isn’t as restrictive probably about extra-curriculars.
#humblebrag
Hopefully this serves as a lesson that when bitching about someone, make sure to do it in an impermanent medium. If someone hears 3rd-hand that you’re talking about them, you can always soften the message. But when the person can read the exact rant, it’s a lot harder to say you didn’t mean it.
We told our kids never to text, email, post, etc anything that you don’t want everyone to read. Even if they totally trust their friend not to share, it’s too easy for someone else to hop onto that friend’s phone or laptop and view all those messages.
This is especially true when ranting about someone who has power over you. When you’re a kid using the internet and laptop paid for by dad to rant about dad, don’t be surprised when dad takes those things away after reading your exact rants. If you rant on facebook about your boss, don’t be surprised when he posts a comment to that rant that says you’re fired.