The fallen laptop.
After his 15-year-old daughter posted a letter to her parents on Facebook – one that she evidently didn’t want them to see – complaining about being forced to do chores and homework and being treated like a “slave”, Tommy Jordan did what any right-thinking American father would do. He put a bullet in her laptop with a .45 pistol.
In a video that’s seen more than 27 million hits on YouTube, Jordan, clad in a wide-brimmed hat, smoking a cigarette, and seated in a lawn chair, reads from the posting that his daughter allegedly made on her Facebook wall. In it, she claims that she’s tired of cleaning the house, doing laundry, and making her bed. He explains in the video that she had been grounded in the past for doing something similar and the he warned her that the next time, it would a lot worse.
“I don’t know how to say how disappointed I am in you and how disrespectful you were to every single adult in your life. But kid, you got it easy, Way easy. It’s about to get harder. It’s about to get a whole lot harder today,” the father from Albermarle, North Carolina says. Then, after explaining that he’s going to post this video on her Facebook for all her friends to see, he fires a series of “exploding, hollow-point rounds” from his .45 into her laptop. “And you have to pay me back for these, too. These are about a dollar a piece.”
“Have a nice day, y’all.”
”My daughter thought it would be funny/rebellious/cool to post on her Facebook wall just how upset she was and how unfair her life here is… She chose to share this with the entire world on Facebook and block her parent’s from seeing it. Well, umm… she failed. As of the end of this video, she won’t have to worry anymore about posting inappropriate things on Facebook… 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.” Tommy Jordan explained in a description of the video.
The Facebook thread featuring the video has more than 41,000 comments on it, and more than 90,000 “likes”. To say it touched a nerve would be an understatement.
“I salute you, sir.” Many of the comments on the post appear to be in support of Jordan’s actions. Said Rosa Navarrete, “You are my hero sir. Kudos. Make sure you stick to your rules. My parents are softies, and that inconsistency confuses a kid. This actually shows how much you care about her. 
”
Childish. But Nicolette Cohen, another Facebook commenter, disagreed: “I can understand your frustration with your child. What she did was very rude and disrespectful. HOWEVER, I do not agree with the way you handled the situation. …The way you handled the situation is similar to the way an adolescent might deal with a disagreement. It’s important to remember that you owe it to your children to be ‘the bigger man’ in any scenario. I hope you and your daughter can still salvage a relationship, but, quite frankly, if my mother had done this to me I would’ve cut ties with her as soon as I was able (even if I could understand her reasoning when I grew up).”
Fantasy? “It represents a fantasy scenario for parents,” Anthony Rotolo, a professor who specialises in social media at Syracuse University in New York, told The Daily Telegraph. “Most parents would not respond in this manner … but many parents have certainly felt unappreciated and imagined taking similar action.”
