Actually… /slides on thick black mansplaining glasses/… “homicide” is a large flightless bird found only on the Oompili islands of Whambamistan…
It’s always fun when the technical meaning is totally at odds with the common definition. Legal definitions seem only second to Botanical definitions in not matching up with common usage. Then whichever definition you use, someone can tell you you’re wrong…
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Yet a parent doesn’t go to prison for choosing to not vaccinate their child.
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Not with a 50. It could be a bunch of encyclopedia brittanicas, and that round is going through them. Heck, I can put some .22 LR rounds all the way through a phone book. I’ve never tried to see how many books/reams of paper a .357 will go through. I don’t even want to shoot a .50 because I like my hands/wrists.
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Pretty sure that these are still being taught.
The problem is that idiots will be idiots.
Also (because I’m sure as hell not going to try to watch this video…) where did this happen? I can’t imagine that this happened at a range. Were they just on their property? Do they have nearby neighbors? What was behind the dude who got shot? So many questions even beyond why someone would be so stupid as to think any book is going to stop a .50…
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Well… The fabled golden tablets the book of mormon is supposedly written on might. If it existed.
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And silver is considerably harder than gold…
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Notice how there was never anyone behind the test target.
Matt from Demolition Ranch: a true paragon of professionalism and range safety. /S
well, at least when he’s not testing the “home made in home shooting range”, but at least the family was away from home for that one…
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I distinctly remember being a teen, partying hard and doing crazy things, and hearing old people say “young people are idiots; they think they’ll never die”. Yet in reality, we were living each day like it might be our last; we were very in tune with our mortality. While they, on the other hand, seemed clueless, eating bran flakes and living bland lives, thinking that would allow them to live forever. It was a weird cognitive dissonance. We were each very aware of our own mortality, but living opposite lives because of it, and each thinking the other was the idiot that didn’t understand the basic concept.
A quarter century later, I still haven’t really resolved that, except to understand that whether young or old, we each have a unique mix of wisdom and stupidity.
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I remember being a teen. I did a lot of dangerous things out of boredom while also not realizing how dangerous they really were.
It’s very easy to not think about it much when you’re just doing something impulsively to get a kick.
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I fired one in vegas a long time ago.
The first advice the range attendand gave to me was to hold it very strongly or i’d risk hitting myself in the head because of the kickback.
Well, i think the .50 pierces a lot less than the .308 so if the book was made of something like ballistic rubber and very very thick it would still have been a very stupid idea, but maybe not a deadly level stupid idea.
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Would prison fix anything? I didn’t get the feeling that this was a brilliantly masterminded plan, I got the feeling that it was two people doing a terminally stupid thing because they were just incredibly ignorant of the circumstances.
Here’s why I’m giving them the benefit of ignorance: what they did is actually a pretty popular stunt, the only problem is that they didn’t fully understand how powerful the gun they were using was. As a kid we used to shoot .22LR bullets into phone books and dig them back out from the pages, even at point-blank range the bullets just lack the amount of energy needed to get through 800-some sheets of paper. We weren’t stupid enough to ever put a phone book between ourselves and the muzzle of a firearm, but we were also raised around firearms meaning gun safety, and also having a visceral (as in hunting, and having to shoot rabid wild animals) understanding of how dangerous they are.
These people probably didn’t. They probably had the vague notion that said “books can stop bullets” and they figured it would make for a novel video. They weren’t technically wrong about either thing–mind you, I’m not saying what they did wasn’t so stupid that it borders on the unrelateable–they just didn’t understand any of the physics.
Maybe I’m missing a vital part of the story, but the US prison system exists exclusively to punish people. This girl doesn’t seem like a murderer to me, she just did something incredibly stupid. Punishment doesn’t fix stupidity, so prison would likely just ruin her life more than she’s already ruined it for herself with a lifetime of guilt and forever being, “that girl.” Sending her to prison would probably just lead to suicide.
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Surely there is a gif of Darwin dancing a little jig.
I don’t think you’re right about this, but if you are: What does it do for/to them? What i mean is: does that plan for prisons (or our actual incarceration situation) actually produce change and improvement?
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Aw shucks, all for little ol’ me?
It wouldn’t be so bad had the member in question actually had something else to contribute to the conversation aside from debatable pedantry… but nope, they just chimed in to gleefully correct someone else.
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With over 100 replies already, and only 1-2 that actual seem to be aware of details of the case, this is probably pointless. But I’m frustrated at how misleading Seamus’s original post is, and how little context it provides.
It takes seconds to read the other linked articles in the Tribune piece. Her sentence has nothing to do with their recording the stunt. It has to do with how even Ruiz’s own family indicate don’t think Monalisa should go to jail, quote it as his idea, asked him no to do it, and reported his fervor for getting 300,000 subscribers.
He also did “test” it with another book, even though it’s unclear if he used a similar book or similar gun. When this came out last year I remember reading that he used a different caliber of gun in his test (his Aunt indicates he, “had plenty of guns. He liked guns.”), but I couldn’t find that source again. Which, yes, would still be foolish.
This is tragic. But hey, “if you film it, you could get off with a significantly less stringent sentence.” sounds more pithy, so why bother being accurate. Gotta get them views, right?
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Sounds crazy, but there’s a very large body of evidence to support the idea that even a pretty bad parent is much better than no parents, and a bad biological parent is better for a child than to be put in states’ care.
You’ve been here all of 37 minutes, and you’re disappointed already?
Damn it, Boing Boing; get it together!
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