My neighbor is in TROUBLE
 

I assume it's him and not her.

Most of us guys don't see a problem giving our 5 and 7 year old boys a slingshot.

Our wives, yeah they might think it's not such a good idea.

Our den has a 25 ft ceiling.

We have two rows of windows, lower and upper. Each window is a double pane 4x7 ft.

So today my wife is sitting in the living room and hears a big bang.

She thinks bird strike.

She looks up and sees a hole in the upper center window.

She runs upstairs to the inside balcony that overlooks the den to get a better look.

In the yard behind us she sees the boys with a slingshot.

She calls their mom and tells her what just happened and she may want to get outside cause right now her boys are aiming at her windows.

Not sure I want to be their dad today.

Initial estimate is $800.

this gives me shivers...my mom thought it would be ok to buy my brother and i, slingshots and pellet guns. i shot out a few neighbor's windows. what was i thinking??? anyways, my mom put me to work paying everything off. my bro was younger, and i had to face the penalty. my dad thrashed me. at a friend's funeral, i saw, Mr. perez...the owner of the window. he came up to my brother and i, and laughed at us. he asked us point blank, "so...how did you two avoid prison?" we were both so embarrased. my brother was in the police acadamy at the time. we drank at the wake with the old man. he even tested his wife.."you reconized these two hoodlums?" she did.

he was a good man. he didnt deserve us as neighbors. i will never let any kids play with toys like that unsupervised.

My best friend and I never got caught. :D We also did not shoot out the neighbors windows. We made sure to sneak out at night and shoot out front lights and lighted address signs a few streets over....

I made a silencer for my bb gun. Worked really well!

My bud Dennis told me he had a BB gun when he was a kid that you cocked/pumped before each shot. I think he said the booklet that came with it said you were never supposed to pump it more than 5 times.

Well, that's nothing more than a challenge to a 13-14 year old. He said he and his buds would pump it 20-25 times and it would really move those BB's.

He said big fun for them was to hide in the bushes behind this gas station near his house and reach out and touch the alarm box on the outside of the jewelry store at this open air mall.

It was about a 100-yard shot.

I put an arrow through my neighbors pool, when I was a kid. (After being repeatedly warned by my old man not to shoot my bow in the yard.)

I still hurt from the ass kicking I got for that!:D

It's pathetic that a dad would give his son a slingshot.

WTF has become of this country?

When I was growing up we made our own using sliced up bicycle innertubes and forked branches that we hand picked and cut from tree branches ourselves.

And did we flaunt them in front of our parents? Yeah, right!

Sheesh!

I remember when the "Wrist Rocket" slingshot first came out. That was like the Barret .50 cal of slingshots. Ordered mine from the back Boys Life magazine. My dad confiscated that thing real quick.

at 11, 12, 13, i had a wrist sling shot. very powerful. i did alot of damage to various objects like neighbors flower pots... :-)

when i was about 11, for some reason, my grandfather who was extremely paranoid and cautious about anything even slightly dangerous, entrusted me with a Crossman 101 "Power without Powder" .22 air rifle (which I still have and love and use often). A few years later....

I hit the neighbor in the rear-end as she was getting the mail one evening as i sat in the woods. She dropped to the ground like that sacrificed cow at the end of Apocalypse Now

The other neighbor was a surgeon and had to remove the pellet and suture up the hole. The police came and interrupted the family dinner....

while plinking with my luger-style BB pistol, probably at about 12, i hit a metal sign post and the BB ricocheted off and hit my mother's friend in the right titty.....

i could go on and on and on

I had one of those. I would take out car windows on passing freight trains - a lot of K cars arrived at the dealer dinged up. I think I'm single-handedly responsible for the new enclose auto carrier rail car design.

So you're saying that I shouldn't have just bought my son a BB gun?:p

I had a slingshot very young and a pellet gun pretty young too. I knew well enough to not shoot out people's *&#$ing windows with them though. Did these kids not get taught respect for other people's things? AKA "That stuff is expensive and your @$$ is paying for it if you break it".

Seriously, if it was an accident, OK. I mean everyone hits that one baseball into their neighbor's house or whatever. But if they are taking pop shots at your house, from next door, while you are in it even... how dumb are these kids?

Good for you Matt! BB guns, BMW bikes, slingshots, skateboards, pocketknives, minibikes, go-carts ect will be outlawed someday if the country keeps heading down the path it is presently headed.

The wussification of America.

for parents wondering what to do, or if the parents are to blame.... i know my parents kept an extremely (overly) tight leash on me. Very strict. However, as a pre-teen, my behavior was heavily influenced by one thing...the movie RAMBO. I thought (was convinced) I was a green beret. there was no stopping me.....would I allow my kid to have access to BB guns and pellet guns and a wrist sling shot at such a young age...hell no! at least not without my involvement and participation. I would never let them wander off into the neighborhood so heavily armed :-)

I honestly think that boys are "wired" to break things...

Our easy-going, kind-hearted son broke his first window when he was 5. He was playing with an old tennis racket, tossing small stones into the air and whacking them. Well, he whacked one through the window of my Jaguar.... The rear door side window that is unique to series II long wheelbase cars.

He broke another window with a baseball at the day care providers a few years later - a house window this time.

When he was about 9, he and his cousins were out on a big lot that we have (1 acre), they were playing golf. The cousins are kind of wimpy and don't hit very far. Ryan hit the ball the length of the lot, over the road, past the side walks, subsequent yard and through a newly built house's window. That one cost about $500 out of pocket, but at a solid 200 yards was a hell of a hit for a 9 year old kid. :rolleyes:

We have numerous guns and he even has a 22 rifle. We are very strict about when and where these items may be handled. His grandmother bought him a pellet gun and despite my numerous warnings, has failed to put into place good safety rules. Well, Ryan was shooting too close to the house, hit a metal bucket and the richochet nailed grandma in the arm.

Boy was she PISSED! :p

I guess the point that I am making is to keep the truly dangerous items limited in access, but the fact is that boys will be boys. You could take every item away from them and they would throw rocks and break things. You're going to buy a few windows while they are growing up. Roll with it and accept it as a way to "meet the neighbors" and teach kids the value of broken items in relation to the work they will do to fix them.

angela

Yup, dad should have given him a shotgun, like any normal american would do :D.

When I was young my brother shot an arrow strait up which got stuck in a tree above the driveway (a 100 ft old big tree), the next morning my dad went to leave for work and was greeted with that arrow sticking through the hood and the top of the engine......car wouldn't start and my ******* bro blamed it on me......

Got my revenge though as when he brought my dads brand new mercury home late one night a few weeks later COVERED in mud (he got it stuck in a field) and gave me 10 bucks to wash it........I kept the money, didn't touch it and went to bed.....he got his ass beat for that and I was in the clear as I didn't have my liscense LOL revenge is sweet, what goes around comes around :D

I lived next to a florist with glass green houses. I only had to break one window to get the message that it was not the proper thing to do. My father had no sympathy for my stupidity.

I had a stupid neighbor when I was a kid whose parents would believe any lie he ever told them. One day my dad arrived home and saw the kid chipping golf balls into our yard and driveway. My dad told him to change directions so as to avoid windows. An hour later my dad came outside again and found a hole in his windshield and a golf ball in his driver's seat with the kid's dad's name printed on it. Would you believe the kid denied he'd done it and his parents believed him?

Yeah, and it's a good thing, too. I barely survived.:D

These kids should be commended, they are stimulating the economy and creating jobs. They are true patriots.