Tommy Jordan, laptop shooter, should try duct tape says 'expert'

Tommy Jordan, laptop shooter, should try duct tape says ‘expert’

By Deborah Netburn

Feb. 14, 2012 12 AM PT

Parents may be applauding Tommy Jordan, the dad from North Carolina who famously shot his 15-year-old daughter’s laptop with a .45 and made a YouTube video to prove it, but parenting expert Larry Winget says he should have skipped the gunfire and turned to duct tape instead.

“To me it would have made more sense to take duct tape and wrap it up and show it to her,” said Winget, the tough talking author of “Your Kids are Your Own Fault” and “You’re Broke Because You Want to Be.” “And I would say look at what you can’t have. In some ways it is meaner that way. The fact that it is absolutely gone, it’s gone. But wrapping it up in duct tape and not letting her have it is meaner, and a stronger punishment.”

But Winget said that the biggest mistake Jordan made was taking a private matter of parenting and making it public.

“I don’t believe that you teach a lesson through humiliating and embarrassing your teenager,” he said. “He should be ashamed for reducing himself to her level. He looks childish, he looks ridiculous — and don’t go on YouTube when you’ve got a cigarette hanging out of your mouth and preach to me.”

(Jordan has said on his Facebook page that he regrets the cigarette.)

Jordan shot his daughter’s laptop after reading aloud from an expletive laden I-hate-my-parents rant she had posted on her Facebook page. He explains that she had recently been grounded for three months after he found a similar post on her Facebook wall.

He didn’t mean for the video to become as public as it became — getting close to 23 million views in just six days. His original plan was to post the video just to his Facebook page, and his daughter’s Facebook page.

As he explains in the video, he hoped it would teach her friends a lesson about thinking her snotty post was “cute,” and teach a lesson to fellow parents that their kids might be writing similar things about them on Facebook.

Winget said he thinks the video went viral because of the shock value.

“I think people look at this and say, man, I ought to be tougher but they won’t actually do it,” he said. “But it’s the parents that created this entitled generation. This is our fault.”