The disgruntled teenage daughter of a tech-savvy, gun-toting father just got a very public lesson in respecting one’s elders.
“That right there is your laptop,” the father, named Tommy Jordan, says in a YouTube video while
pointing a video camera at a computer on laying in a patch of dirt and grass. “This right here is my .45,” he says, moving a pistol into the frame.
He cocks the weapon and shoots nine exploding hollow-point rounds into the laptop.
Okay, rewind.
Jordan’s 15-year-old daughter apparently wrote a Facebook post complaining about the chores she has to do at home and the overall hassle that her parents make her life. The father took exception to the public airing of grievances, and so decided to exact his own bit of public revenge, according to the video description, as well as Facebook and Reddit posts he appears to have made.
The role of social media in family life has been debated since social networks began to catch on, but Jordan appears to be taking a proactive approach.
In the video, which is titled “Facebook Parenting: For the troubled teen.” and looks to be shot from a tripod, Jordan sits down in a chair outdoors with a computer print-out in hand. He dedicates the recording to his daughter and, “more importantly for all her friends on Facebook who thought that her little rebellious post was cute, and for all you parents out there who think your, you know, kids don’t post bad things on Facebook.”
Jordan says he works in IT for a living (and, indeed, appears to run a company called Twisted Networx) and chastises his daughter for thinking she could hide the note from him with privacy settings. He then reads the purported note aloud after explaining, “since you want to hide it from everyone, I’m going to share it with everybody.”
In the note, the daughter says that she should be paid for the chores she does and her parents overwork her, criticizing them harshly. Jordan says that her complaints are mostly unjustified, and contrasts it to the work he had to do growing up.
After about seven minutes of preamble, he gets up from the chair and plugs the computer full of lead.
Jordan writes in the video description: “Maybe a few kids can take something away from this… If you’re so disrespectful to your parents and yourself as to post this kind of thing on Facebook, you’re deserving of some tough love. Today, my daughter is getting a dose of tough love.”
Mashable has attempted to contact Jordan for further comment, but so far has not received a response.
Do you think this is an effective use of social media in parenting? Appropriate or inappropriate? Let us know in the comments.
I have seen the video, I know that the kid did something wrong but it isn’t right to shoot her laptop because of that. The kid might be traumatizing because of that incidence. I have known that many parent felt okay of what the father did but for me, this isn’t good and should not be done.
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