Paging Darwin

Saturday July 08, 2017

A while ago a young woman and man decided that they wanted to be stars.  More, specifically, they wanted to be internet stars.  More, more specifically, you tube stars.  Even if you haven't heard the story you can see where this one is going.  True to your suspicions, the decided to do something very, very stupid to achieve this goal.

They decided that it would be a good idea to pull a stunt with a gun and a phone book.  The gun was a .50 cal Desert Eagle and the phone book, well, it was just a regular phone book.  The stunt was this:  The young man would put the phone book against his chest and the young lady would take the pistol and fire it into the phone book from a foot away.  The thought, if one could call it that, was that the phone book would stop the bullet from hitting the young man.

As I have said before, I am not a "gun guy" but even I could have figured out that having a high caliber gun fired at your chest from a foot away is a really bad idea, phone book or no.  I generally do my best to avoid having guns pointed at me at all.  It is a policy that seems to have served me well over the years.

These people did not have that policy.  As you can guess the stunt did not quite go according to plan.  The gun was fired and the bullet went through the phone book.  Yay!!  What a great stunt.  The bullet then proceeded to go through the young man's chest.  Boo!!  And this spectacular entry to the annals of the Darwin Awards was all captured on video.  Ok, technically, they are only runners up for the Darwin Award.

Now, I am not a nice person (you probably figured that out already, huh?).  Misanthrope, though not one hundred percent accurate, has been used to describe me.  I prefer to think of my self as more of a cynic, and as we know, a cynic is nothing more than a bruised romantic.  Anyway, I cemented my status as a not terribly nice guy when my first response upon hearing this story was "good".  It is not that I wanted anyone to die, per say, but it has long been my opinion that sometimes the gene pool needs a little chlorine.  Harsh? sure, but look at the world we live in.  Dealing with folks like this will tie up resources that could be used to help people that don't think it would be a good idea to be shot with a .50 cal pistol.

Now, while I feel no sympathy for these two, I do feel a great deal of sympathy for their children.  They had one and one on the way.  These kids are down one parent and, depending on how the trial goes, may be down one more, at least for a while.  Now I am hoping that being away from this couple dense enough to bend light will, in the long run, be good for them.  I know it is hard to have to grow up without parents but I know from personal experience that it is even harder to grow up with bad ones.  On the up side though, at least the couple won't be having any more children.

My hope is that maybe this experience will shock the stupid out of this young woman and she will be able to, in time, redeem herself and become a useful member of society.  My experience with society, however, makes me think that that hope may be a bit too high.  Here's hoping that the children can learn from their parent's impressively dumb-ass display of poor choices in action.

Rant Over... for now