Sure enough, some clowns have been getting their comeuppance recently.
I had predicted (which was rather obvious) that wearing a mask and going around scaring people wouldn't end well for the masked idiots. Thanks to reader JoeMama, we have a report that one clown has indeed experienced such a comeuppance. The Daily Mail: Creepy clown gets beat up with a baseball bat when he tries to scare a group of friends hanging out in their car
Scaring strangers by putting on a clown mask and approaching them generally isn't the smartest idea. Basically, scaring strangers in an uncontrolled environment is never a good idea as you don't know how they will react.
It also can lead to criminal charges:
Two eighteen year olds in Michigan wearing clown masks and carrying a bat who chased some 14 year old teenagers and were caught, arrested and appropriately charged with disorderly conduct.
While the current creepy clown craze may be mainly overplayed hysteria, idiots like these aren't helping, and this isn't "reality" television where the scares are either safely conducted or dramatized for TV in a controlled situation.
While scaring your friends may be all well and good, scaring strangers who aren't in on the joke can lead to some pretty bad results.
One day some stupid clown prankster is going to have a weapon in hand and try and scare a stranger and the stranger will have a response that will be something like this:
That's not going to end well for the clown.
It's also not going to be pleasant for the person who ends up shooting in the reasonable belief that their life is being threatened by a masked person advancing on them with a weapon. While it will likely be legally justifiable, having to shoot someone even justifiably is a majorly traumatic situation, and the clown idiots will have forced a normal person to shoot them with all the trauma that involves over their attempted attack/scare game/bad joke.
The people the clowns are scaring aren't in on the joke, (assuming it is a joke and not an attempted at armed robbery or other criminal conduct under the guise of a joke), and the clowns are causing them to have a reasonable and justifiable belief that they're about to be threatened with deadly force. What could possibly go wrong?
1 comment:
Had a guy walk up to me, my wife and kids when we were out trick-or-treating on Halloween many years ago. He had on the outfit from Scream and was carrying what looked like a large carving knife (real or not is unknown but it sure looked real in the dim light). He had been hiding in the shadows next to a house where we had rung the doorbell and then started following us without saying a sound. He kept his distance for awhile but then closed in and I had the wife and kids move on while I turned to confront him. Let me just say I took appropriate action and yes I was armed. Bottom line was he backed off and did not bother us further. Found out he had been doing that for a couple or few years every Halloween but I heard that for some unknown reason, he stopped with that particular year. Maybe he realized how close he had come to never being able t do it again.
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