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.

By any chance was the last name on the Golf Ball, "Hamilton"?

No, it was Cesiro.:cool:

I shot myself in the eye with my first bb gun. :rolleyes: the bb hit a cinder block and ricocheted straight back. Somehow I saw it right before it hit me and I closed my eyes. Still hurt. I guess this was karma getting me back before I actually shot out porch lights.

My son has a BB gun and a 4-wheeler, I guess he can have his own cavalry now.:D

We used a BB gun and kept shooting at a street light. a few days later, as we kept shooting at it, and finally the giant lense fell on top of a brand new T-top camero. Lucky I wasn't there the very last day. Their parents were pissed and had to pay for it.

When I was growing up, back when we weren't "wussified," the neighbor kid shot out his brother's eye with a bow and arrow. It literally changed the kid's life overnight. He had been outgoing and turned shy and became withdrawn. Nothing the family did -- even the one-eyed brother -- could bring the kid back.
You risk destroying more than one life if you give a kid destructive power without proper orientation.

I saw a kid get almost killed by one of those things once in a 'Wristrocket war'.

We only ever did that once. LOL.

I am pretty sure i was likewise responsible for the entire redesign of payphone coin slots in the early 1980s.

You see, a 1/4 stick of dynamite used to slide right into the coin slot.... >:}

Too bad it happened back then, as if it happened today, the kid could probably sue his brother and parents for a few million. Insurance would pay it and then our rates would go up some more to cover his accident.

My fascination grows. :)

My weapon of choice as a kid was a sling, ala David v Goliath. You would not believe the damage that can be done with a well-built sling, loaded with either a single, palm-sized boulder or a handfull of pea-gravel. We could launch a stone so hard it would penetrate 3/4" plywood. It could also be slung well over a hundred yards. The pea-gravel made a great shotgun effect, useful for hunting small animals. Thank God I never mentioned it to my kids. In those days, I lived in a rural small town, with plenty of targets that nobody cared about. The suburbs would be a much different story.

edit: Oh yeah, another one - does anyone remember the tennis ball cannons we made? Lighter fluid, several cans duct taped together to form a tube, the bottom can kept it's lids, and a small hole in the bottom. Spray the fluid into the barrel and air it out a bit. Ram the tennis ball to the bottom and have your friend hold the contraption while you light the small hole on the bottom can. Good for about 100 yard launch.

In college, the eight-story dormitory buildings were set in pairs, two buildings facing each other across a quad, but offset so they were not directly across from each other.

For whatever reason, the architects failed to offset one pair of dormitories, these two buildings did face each other directly.

Big mistake. Those two dormitories hated each other, every year, for decades and to this day for all I know. "We" and "they" each had whole batteries of those tennis ball cannons, and would fire salvos of flaming tennis balls across the quad (yes, we juiced up the technology a little). The glowing balls thumping into windows and bouncing into balcony doors, along with the rain of exploding bottle rockets and various unsavory projectiles launched with five foot lengths of surgical tubing - ah, those were the days.

Pop handed me the pellet gun at 10, gave me the usual warrnings, so I loaded it up, walked out the door, put one in the neighbor's dogs face, never got to touch it again.

So I started getting black cats and Flour together with the predictable results. That lead to its own problems.

If they pay for the window immediately, and the boy has to do my lawn for 3 months, then maybe it would be ok.
Kids will be kids.
But some end up getting worst. here is an example:
http://headlines.ocregister.com/news/cars_20447___article.html/vandalism_sheriff.html

Shot my neighbour kid through the right ear lobe with my pellet gun....they were teasing me and chucking firecrackers down my gum boots (it was out on the farm after all) and I got frustrated and fired....

It makes me shiver how close it was to his eye, I took a lambasting for that one and I deserved every bit of it. For those people that do not believe in spanking, I believe in it....it gave me a lesson I never will forget about keeping my anger under control.

Dennis

What college? A guy I used to work with participated in similar tennis ball artilleryfests at Clemson in the early to mid-70's.

Berkeley.

One of the lawyers I have working with me graduated from Stanford in 1970. I asked him once if they had enough time for classes between the riots. He smiled and said the classes were pass/fail. Whenever a group of people got too far behind on midterms or papers, they'd organize a riot and shut down the campus for a while. They would shoot ball bearings out of wrist rockets at the riot cops. In retrospect he's pretty appologetic abot it and isn't sure how they didn't kill anyone. The only thing that made them back off was when they brought the mounted police in. He said that when the mounted cops formed battle line and started high-stepping toward them, there was nothing you could do but get out of there.

When my oldest son turned 12 I bought him his first BB gun. Being a vetran of many BB gun war, I shopped around to find the absolute best combination of durrability, price and fps ratio. As I suspected, I found one that was a complete outlier: almost .22 level performance for just a few dollars more. Sadly, I thought back to the mayhem I caused with my first Red Ryder as I learned how to handle it responsibly, and remembered how having a weak spring action probably saved me and our windows more times than I care to admit. So, with a heavy heart I selected a very tame gun for almost the same cost. He's doing well with it, so next year I'll make it up to him and buy him a real 10 pump gun.

i forgot to mention the damage i did to person and property with my throwing star collection. before age 16, i was a strange combination of Rambo and ninja. those were the days and i miss that simple life of stalking neighbors

not sure about now, but back in the early 80's, it was not easy for a kid to find throwing stars...when you did get some, i remember feeling very well armed and special :-)

sounds sick to me now but, i would hide and when someone walked passed something wooden, i would throw the star and make it stick in the wood a few inches from the person like you might see in a movie... yikes

All very interesting.

Not entirely sure how we managed to survive childhood.

We used to have BB gun fights, no head shots allowed.

All the cool kids had wrist rockets.

Roman Candle wars on the 4th.

Was around 5 or so. Living in Stuttgart at the time.

Omi had a housewares business and one day she made bow and arrows out of small plant support sticks and string for my older brother and I.

I guess it did not occur to her that we might go find a knife and sharpen the arrows.:eek:

I shot my friend Uve in the stomach and pierced skin about 1/4 inch deep . Luckily for me Uve was a chubby kid so there was little blood and the trauma was worse than the actual injury.