Laptop Dad gets a visit from the authorities. (And they say "Meh!")

[Yo_Mama]

98. Different set of cops, surely?

The city manager is saying it wasn't their cops that went to check him out, because they don't have jurisdiction.

Since it isn't their set of cops (probably the country sheriff's), of course what the city manager says has nothing to do with what police who did go out said to the guy.

I realize a lot of people aren't rural, because it is quite common for rural people in "those" states to shoot on their property. There is nothing odd about what this guy did, except that he put it on Facebook.

So nothing about what you posted makes the guy a liar.

I think a lot of this clash has to do with the cultural issue over guns. If you were raised in an area in which they are useful (for legal purposes), odds are your feelings about guns are entirely different. You do not look at them as being threatening objects except in context (if he had pointed the gun at his kid rural people would be going looney too - that would be equivalent to him posting a video of him threatening to run his kid over with a truck). You may look at them as a useful tool, and if you lived in an area like mine, in which you have to shoot a couple of poisonous snakes a year just to get out your own door or in your car, you probably look at them as safety equipment akin to the fire extinguisher in the kitchen.

Since most kids in those areas are taught gun safety and how to shoot when young, and since this is commonly done on home turf, the emotional reaction to the execution of the laptop is just not the same, apparently. Most people shoot at cans or targets on their own property at least when they have kids. You want to teach them what not to do with a gun and how to use it properly.

See, to some the video of him shooting the laptop looks like violence, but to a rural person, it's just not going to leave that impression at all. In my home county, it's more like he identified it as a danger and offed it. You're not going to react as if he was threatening his kid, because he wasn't. The kid certainly would not react that way.

Smacking the laptop with a sledgehammer is no less violent, running it over is no less violent, and for that matter, simply dissembling it and destroying the components in another manner is no less violent. I doubt very much many of the people who are claiming violence would be reacting in the same way if he had used those methods.