What goes “clop clop clop clop BANG clop clop clop clop”?
An Amish drive-by shooting.
I want to first say paintball guns are safe when used correctly.
But most paintball guns can be set to speeds that will certainly cause death (or in many cases, wish for you to die 
).
My modified Tippmann Pro/carbine can fire up to 375 fps (with rather old paintballs that didn’t shatter 5 feet from the gun) so it can be set rather high. Being shot in the face (eyes, mouth) with a non-fresh or frozen paint ball will put you down without protection. I would say the distance would have to be under 50 feet to be effective at killing you though (and in the story it sounds like the kids may have been that close).
In Canada paintball and BB guns are apparently firearms as per our chief of police (in a statement after a rash of BB gun shootings in the GTA).
Something similar happened about five or six years ago on a freeway outside Sydney, where i was living at the time. The rock went straight through the windscreen, killing the driver instantly. After that, tall fences with inward-curving tops were put over such freeway overpasses. The culprits got caught and, IIRC, are serving serious prison time. They were aged about 14-20, and there were three of them, i think.
Oh, bullshit. The guy might have had a legitimate reason to be driving on the public roadway.
A note on paintball guns: Paint on the windshield can certainly be quite dangerous.
=http://www.theindependent.com/stories/070303/new_cement03.shtml]It happened a few hours from here in July.
Apparently “Let’s go drop something we can barely lift on someone we don’t know” is one of those universal thoughts. Assholes.
These two kids who lived on the street adjacent to our’s were always throwing stuff at cars. Once they hit our back window with a jar of mustard. If the window had broken, it would’ve hit my head.
Later on, we saw some guy get out his car and take off after them.
This guy was a major asshole. However, these kids weren’t exactly from the deepest end of the gene pool.
As someone who grew up in Holmes County just down the road from Mt. Hope, where this incident ocurred, please allow me to dispell some of the misinformed b.s. in this thread.
Point #1: It is a near-complete myth that Amish teenagers are “wild.” They are such only in comparison to younger or older Amish people. If you saw 18-year-old freshmen in college smoking weed, getting drunk, and tipping over garbage cans, would you think it unusual behavior for someone their age? No, you’d say they just being a kid. Same with the Amish. It’s true the Amish way of raising kids allows them a much greater degree of freedom in a shorter period of time than non-Amish parenting methods, but Amish kids don’t use that freedom to do anything that is considered unheard-of for other teens to do, with or without their parents’ permission. If you ask me, the Amish are far more sensible about it than most mainstream parents. They don’t kid themselves that young Ishmael is a little angel because “he’s MY kid.”
Point #2: The average young Amish person (say, under 30) is provincial in the extreme. This comes from having rarely travelled more than 50 miles from home in their lifetime, and also from almost never going to school past the 6th grade. Since about 95% of all Amish make their living through farming, they don’t feel the need for any education past basic reading and writing. You won’t find many books in an Amish household, and VERY few written after about 1950.
Does this mean they’re stupid? No, but it does mean they don’t know many of the things we take for granted, such as how unwise it is to throw things at cars.
Point #3: Violence of this sort is completely unheard of in Holmes County. The whole community is probably in shock right now. Homicides of any kind happen there about once per decade, and this is the first one I can ever rmember hearing about that involved an Amish person in any way.
Of course it’s obvious now they didn’t take him seriously, but I can guarantee these kids never for one minute thought the shooter would seriously harm them, even after he threatened to do it. Such an act would be so far removed from their experience as to make it unimaginable. This does not make them stupid; it makes them fatally naive. In this, they are no worse than most young people in Holmes County, Amish or not.
Point#4: Blaming the “the community” for not putting a stop to tomato throwing is idiotic. Do we blame “the community” of the New York borough Bedford-Stuyvesant for all the teens selling crack on the streets there? Lumping all Amish together as if they were all the same and saying “the community” acts as one betrays a fundamental arrogance.
Point #5: The Amish may be provincial, poorly educated, and naive compared to the rest of us. They might, in our judgement, allow their children too much freedom. But Holmes County has one of the lowest unemployment rate of any county in Ohio (look it up if you don’t believe me, it’s true) for a reason. It’s easy, watching that movie “Kingpin” or listening to Weird Al Yankovic’s “Amish Paradise,” to think these people are just a big goofy joke. The truth is they work harder than anyone this side of India for their living, certainly harder than you or I. Think it’s easy plowing a field with a team of horses, or cutting an entire field of hay by hand with a scythe? Try it sometime.
The point is, they choose to live these lives because of values they sincerely believe in. They choose to work harder every minute of every day than most of the rest of us. And that’s no joke.
p.s. - For the record, I am not Amish or Mennonite myself, nor was I ever. I just grew up there, one of “the English.”
If someone kept on throwing tomatoes at my car, or shooting paintballs at me, I would have been ticked off, but I don’t think I would shoot them. I would have simply called the police or something and make them pay for any damage.
Amish or not, you don’t do this behavior.
Two little beat-offs decapitated a chap with a cinder block off of an overpass a handful of years ago around here. They were treated as juveniles in court. They should have been treated as mulch.
A women driving along in this neck of the woods (Oklahoma), was the target of a cretin with a jar of some sort of acid. Can’t remember just what kind, it was last year.
The local news did a folow up on her. She lost the sight in one eye. She has horrible scars on her face, neck, chest and arms. She is in therapy fighting severe depression. The overpass bandit was never caught.
Don’t fuck with moving cars. You can ruin lives.