Gun-toting dad's threatening 'joke' about his daughter's prom date didn't go over well

Are we really still doing this?
 By 
Jack Morse
 on 

Threatening murder to control your daughter's sex life is soooo funny, right?

Oh, wait, no it's not. It's horrifying — a fact that seems to have escaped gun-toting Dad and former NFL player Jay Feely when he tweeted out a picture of himself standing between his daughter and her prom date, pistol in hand.

"Wishing my beautiful daughter and her date a great time at prom," he wrote.

With the hashtag #BadBoys, Feely is clearly making a reference to a scene in Bad Boys II where the main characters threaten a 15-year-old boy taking one of their daughter's on a date.

That movie came out in 2003, and it's debatable if the joke was funny even then.

It's certainly not now.

Obviously, we're in the middle of a heated national conversation about gun violence following too many mass shootings to count. But there's also something to be said about the way Feely's "joke" denies his daughter's agency -- which is to say, her ability to think and act as a free-thinking human capable of making her own decisions.

That kind of attitude should (in a just world) be as out of style as, well, treating a deadly weapon as a source of humor.

Feely did tweet out a clarification, noting that it was all just a joke and that he takes "gun safety seriously" — adding that "I did not intend to be insensitive to that important issue."

But, again, Feely is missing the point. Guns, even when they are "not loaded," aren't jokes. And his daughter is not his property.

In other news, Friday was the 19th anniversary of the Columbine school shooting that left 23 students injured as well as 12 students and one teacher dead.

Topics X/Twitter

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Jack Morse

Professionally paranoid. Covering privacy, security, and all things cryptocurrency and blockchain from San Francisco.

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