Atlanta rapper encourages people to use paintballs instead of actual bullets, if one must satiate the need to shoot firearms. The message was seemingly intended to curb violence; except when some dickheads unleashed a torrent of paintballs on a bunch of people at a public gas station, one enraged 15-year old fired back – with a real firearm. And of course, a toddler was inadvertently struck and killed in the completely unnecessary and preventable fracas, and so now a child is dead and a teenager is in all likelihood going to prison for a long time and the people shooting paintballs who started the whole incident are nowhere to be found.
Hashtag Atlanta not the TV show
It’s a little difficult who really should be responsible for the root of this whole incident. On one hand, we have some c-list rapper using his social media reach to even put the wise idea into the heads of little impressionable wannabe thugs that shooting guns is okay as long as it’s with paintballs and not actual bullets. On the other hand, the dumbasses he influences aren’t really his responsibility, and he’s not the one who fired at actual people, since his own genius video documentation of him vandalizing things were usually inanimate objects.
I think the seeds to why I felt like writing about it is simply the fallacy of the intention of suggesting paintballs over bullets; which is basically why shoot anything at all? In what world outside of the Middle East are people afflicted with the urge to need to shoot shit to where a suggestion of paintballs over bullets would even be made in the first place? Look, I know coming from America there’s a lot of irony in that statement, but still, there’s something seriously wrong with the idea of if you must shoot guns is even a perceived thing in the first place.
Life isn’t like a Mentos commercial; any idiot who gets the idea that shooting shit is okay as long as they’re using paintballs isn’t going to go shoot up whatever things they want, and when confronted, brandish a paintball gun, and everyone who’s had their shit vandalized or been struck by paintballs isn’t going to just laugh it off and move on. No, they’ll still press charges, they’ll still look for justice, and in the aforementioned story, they might actually retaliate. With real guns.
Imagine if a rapper made a video about minding their own business and adhering to the law. But they did it in a manner where it looked illicit and illegally cool, but it still worked at getting impressionable young people into wanting to be just like them, and then society started improving as a result of it. That would be some shit.
But instead, it can’t possibly be a surprise when people with followings make videos of themselves doing stupid shit and the dumbasses of the world feel emboldened and inspired to do the same, except to way more severe and extreme collateral damages and consequences. Next thing you know, some bozo will release a video about how the sucker punch is totally okay, as long as you’re wearing a 24 oz. glove so you don’t kill someone, but then when some rando plebe does it, but the person they didn’t knock out gets back up and then beats the shit out of them to death and then goes to prison over it, who’s really going to be responsible for the stupidity of people?
