If the kid dies (and let’s hope he doesn’t) he’d be a shoo-in for a Darwin Award!

Based on the latest rulings coming out in this area I’m wondering if that neighbor, Scott Moore, might not be up for some litigation from this maroon’s folks.

Personally, I think the kid should have to wear a sign that says “If you buy gas the terrorists will win”
That would be really funny.

Ya know… there is only one sure cure for stupidity… and it involves a pine box ...

Ignorance can be cured. Stupidity is terminal

Lovely Darwin t-shirt What this teenager really needs is a visible tat: “Don’t let me reproduce”

A few years ago a high school kid in our town was hit by a train as he walked down the tracks wearing headphones.  The engineer tried desperately to get his attention but the kid’s music was cranked way up.  Or so we surmise.  There was a lot of outrage against the railroad - they should have fences, there should be stronger laws, they should be sued, etc.

My oldest son wrote a very mature, reasonable editorial for the high school paper saying the kid was responsible for his own death and the railroad was not in any way responsible.  For this he got a lot of anger from other students, got called into the principal’s office and lectured about “journalistic responsibility,” and after that his editorials had to be vetted before publication.

Lectured about “journalistic responsibility” by the principal, that is the problem with society today.  The ‘leaders’ be they in education, politics, religion, etc. all are so busy protecting their asses, bowing to the majority (even if they are wrong), and telling everyone how they ought to do something that when a voice of honesty does speak up it is punished, shouted down, or dismissed as unresponsible, a troublemaker, or an idiot.

I know you must be proud of your son and it must bother you that he was censured when he was definiely right in his opinion of the situation.  I know it certainly bothers me.

I really can’t wait to see who the parents sue first, a television show or music. Anyone taking odds???

Nah, it’ll be any computer game with lava in it :/

D

I think society should be able sue parents for irresponsibly raising their children. Class action suits…

I hate lawyers, but I am surprised one has not come up with a way to do this.

This child’s actions, stupid as they may be, will cost his community for his medical bills will be covered by insurance, or the state.

When enough morons harm themselves, without killing themselves, they drive the cost of health insurance up as surely as when they have car accidents, harming the rest of us.

A friend of mine likes to joke that in NY you need to have a license to drive, cut hair and be a massuse, but any asshole with reproductive organs can breed… sometimes I wonder if that is a good thing :(

Raising a child is the ultimate responsiblity a person can take on. I may only have a step daughter who has been in my life for 4 years or so (she is now 9, and her mother and I were married this year after dating for a while) but the most important thing that we have taught her is how to not only think for herself, but critical thinking… this should be taught in all schools, and maybe it would help stem the tide of stupidity.

Is this a bit meandering… maybe… long day

captcha = indeed

Regarding shelli’s post - this kid, should he live (if you can call what he faces such) will need no tat for identification.  And it’s highly doubtful he’ll ever find himself in a position to reproduce.  Not too many dates in this poor idiot’s future.  An amazing example of Evolution in Action.

I basically agree with any of you and I do not want to defend the boy, but you talk as if nothing would ever happen to you. Who among you can seriously claim that they never did anything wrong? I know this fact went too far, but sometimes we just like to exceed and this is especially true when we’re talking about USA.
I do remember I did something stupid when I was 5. I was on a moped (no, I was not driving!) and I (accidentally) put one foot into the wheel. Well, the truth is that I sort of did that on purpose, to see what would have happened. Silly me. I guess you can be reckless at 5, but the society won’t forgive that at 15. As a general rule, I try not to judge, but we sure have the right to comment!
Bye everyone

Silvia - Yes we do make mistakes but this fails miserably in that category.  There are so many other avenues that these youths could have pursued to gain the knowledge that they sought after.  Supposedly they just wanted to see what it felt like to run with burning clothes on.  Assuming this is the case, why not talk to a local firefighter or other trained personnel?  They showed no critical thought process whatsoever, aside from adding accelerate.  At the age of 15 that is not a mistake, that’s stupidity.

As far as parental liability I think it’s a mixed bag.  Some parents do a horrible job in raising their children and somehow the child turns okay.  Other parents do a seemingly decent job and the kid just goes south.  Granted, the more parental guidance the better but as far as getting some sort of legal decision?

I have had a few disagreements with parents in public with regards to their children.  I have no problem in showing my dissatisfaction in a child’s or teenager’s behavior and asking the parent to correct it.  I don’t allow children to address me by first name and I get a lot of respect from the kids in my neighborhood because they know exactly what to expect from me each and every time they come encounter me.  Helps being 6’1”, 235 lbs too.

Silvia, there is a considerable difference between being a five year old who does something stupid and being a 15 year old who does something stupid. You would think that by the age of 15 most kids would have been taught that dousing oneself in gasoline and then setting themselves on fire might be an unnecessarily risky thing to do.

You’re right, though, that we’ve all done boneheaded things. I can recall an incident I did myself involving gasoline that resulted in the temporary loss of my eyebrows.

I was attempting to recreate an experiment I had seen on Mr. Wizard where he used a little bit of gasoline in a coffee can to blow the lid off of it. The can had a small ignition hole on the side of it made with a nail. It’s the same principle behind the spud guns or tennis ball cannons you sometimes read about (and I had my own tennis ball cannon years later). Anyway, I got an old coffee can and made the hole and put it on the small cement porch off the back of our garage. Added a small amount of gasoline, put the lid on, and struck a match.

Sure enough, it blew the lid off just like on TV. What I didn’t realize, however, was that I had put in more gasoline than I needed to and some of it had leaked out onto the small porch and was currently burning itself off. I was worried about the puddle spreading towards the house itself, though, so I figured I should put the fire out and that was when I made my mistake.

I ran over and grabbed the garden hose which I had already laid out with the water turned on and a spray nozzle connected for just such an emergency. The little cement porch was more like a step as it was a poured concrete block of about maybe 5 feet by 5 feet so there wasn’t a lot of room for the burning gasoline to go anywhere and made it uncomfortably close to the house. I stepped up onto the porch and placed myself between the fire and the garage thinking that if the puddle moved when hit with the water it would go away from the garage. I didn’t expect this to be a big deal because the flames were all of an inch high at most.

Clearly I had given this more than a little thought, but the one thing I hadn’t considered was that I lacked the knowledge of what happens when you spray a gasoline fire with water under pressure. When I squeezed the handle on the nozzle and the water hit the gasoline that little inch or so high flame suddenly shot up in a wall of fire about a foot in front of me. It startled me so badly I lept through the fire into the yard, singing my eyebrows off in the process.

I learned a valuable lesson that day at the expense of my eyebrows and I was fortunate enough not to be injured more severely, but even then at that age (I think I was all of 10 or 11) I was smart enough not to soak my own shirt in gasoline and then strike a match to it. My mistake was a lack of knowledge about how to properly contain the fire if it got out of hand. This kid’s mistake was that he was a complete moron who apparently thought he was fireproof.

Oh, it’s not at all that anyone here can claim never to have done something stupid at some point in their lives.  It’s just that there’s ignorance and there’s flat-out willful stupidity.  Nobody expects a five-year-old to know what will happen if they put their foot in a wheel.  But by the time you’re fifteen, you really expect that EVERYONE knows that if you douse yourself in something flammable and then light it, you are going to hurt yourself very, very badly.  (It’s clear that he KNEW it was flammable, which is why he encouraged his friends to light him up.)

This is less a case of ignorance and more a case of a dangerous, contrasurvival lack of common sense.  It’s the same thing that causes adults to challenge the laws of physics and lose (if you get going fast enough and run into something, it will be BAD).  They KNOW what will happen and yet they do it anyway, mostly for the thrill of (they hope) getting away with it, beating the odds.  Except that nobody beats the odds forever, and if you’re really stoopid, you stack the odds against you all by yourself.

("side")

Just for the record, the sue the parent’s thing was tounge in cheek…

But there is something to be said for personal responsibility. I think we all have the right to be a total schmuck and all but kill ourselves ... but don’t expect us to pick up the pieces of your folly

This boy was not ignorant, he was stupid, and I really have little sympathy for him. Does this make me a bad person? I hope not, I am just realistic about certain things and well, there is nothing intelligent or redemable about dousing yourself in petrol and trying to become Johnny Torch from the Fantasitc Four

Hey!
Maybe the parents will sue Marvel Comics?

Comics? Well the captcha is “issue”

That whole idea of blaming other people for someone’s stupid mistake seems pretty ridiculous to me.  This kid should be expected to take responsiblity for his own actions.  You can’t blame anybody but him.  Sure, it’s easy to go after the parents, but remember, they’re only raising their kids the same way they were raised, so really, shouldn’t we blame the grandparents? Or how about we go back even farther?  Come on, everybody, let’s go dig up the dead bodies of this kid’s ancestors and scold them for producing such a dipstick!  Yeah right.  Come on, people.  I will consent that there should be some parental liability, but this kid is fifteen and even if he has complete morons for parents, he should have learned the dangers of gasoline in school.

MagicToad’s entry reminds of that old Sunday School song:

Father Abraham had many sons, and may sons had father Abraham, La da da tah dah, da da da dah... It’s all HIS fault!

Wow!  I left for a few hours and when I came back, this topic has just EXPLODED!!!

Sorry.  No, really, I apologize.  That was uncalled for.  I am a horrible person. 

Thanks, Momma, I certainly am proud of my son - of all three of ‘em.  (Mrs. DOF corrects my memory: it was the dean who chewed out my son, not the principal.  But otherwise I got it right.) My son was totally right, and his editorial was very well written.  Every time I think of it I want to call that guy up and tell him off all over again.

If you injure yourself in an exceptionally stupid way you might deserve sympathy for your pain but the sympathy comes to a screeching halt the moment you start to blame anyone else for it. 

However… I wonder if the kid who burned himself was allowed to play with firecrackers, matches, etc.?  I did (under controlled circumstances,) and also had a soldering iron that I used a lot, so I knew what very small burns felt like.  The gasoline stunt would NOT have occurred to me.

Are we keeping our kids too safe?  Those little injuries of childhood serve an important purpose.

Are we keeping our kids too safe?  Those little injuries of childhood serve an important purpose.

Interesting ... I have been thinking the same for a while now, really ever since I realized I was going to become a stepfather and poof! have a 9 year old girl under my care.

I think the small screwups, colds, sicknesses, and related childhood cockups are essential. We need to protect our kids from the huge scale flameouts (sorry, I am a horrible person too…   ) but allow them to make mistakes that they can learn from.

I was caught stealing my old man’s Pall Mall red cigarettes when i was around 11 or so. He went to his room, grabbed a Cohiba #2 from his humidor, and made me smoke the thing. Did it stop me from smokeing.. nope… but it did teach me something… never inhale a cigar :-D

Whats my point? What doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.

As long as the kid has the inate ability to learn from his or her mistakes, its better to let them screwup from time to time than to try and raise them in a bubble… as too many people are doing nowadays…

Hmm… I see a longer post comming from this… after a few drinks later maybe ...

-j-

I read an article in Time Magazine a couple of months ago about the development of the brain and the author made a scientific case for the notion that teenagers’ brains are dramatically underdeveloped by nature and that accounts for some of the stupid things that they do. I agree with the assesment. I remember a drastic difference in my “maturity” between the ages of 18 and 24 (I have my journals to prove it.)
The exact thing describe on this blog happened in my neighborhood about six years ago. A kid who lives three doors down from me doused himself with gasoline and lit a match. He claims he wasn’t suicidal, just curious. Unfortunately, his curiosity damaged about 80% of his body. Fortunately his face wasn’t affected and when he’s fully clothed (wearing long pants, not shorts) you can’t tell there’s anything wrong. And he’s had a couple of girlfriends since, so the dating thing’s not a problem. I used to jump of the roof of my dad’s two-story house when I was fifteen and injured my back, something I still live with 22 years later.

About the kid who was hit by a train...most people don’t know that trains are not as easy to hear as you might think when you’re directly in front of them. Most of the loudest sound projects from the sides. By the time the horn is loud enough to wake someone from a reverie, the train can’t be stopped in time.

And, yeah, I used to play on the railroad tracks. I’m sure I gave at least one engineer his share of heart palpitations by jumping off the tracks almost before it was too late. Man, I was a dumb kid. :p

Then again, my dad tells the tale of how he had to hang off a trestle by his hands when a train came along, so maybe it runs in the family.

most people don’t know that trains are not as easy to hear as you might think when you’re directly in front of them… By the time the horn is loud enough to wake someone from a reverie, the train can’t be stopped in time.

Interesting about the sound.  Sounds like a good problem for accoustic engineers - to come up with a special horn that would amount to a sonic weapon to force pedestrians off the track.  It could project 1970’s bubblegum rock or something.

The notion that a train should stop is problematic.  People need to understand that trains can’t stop.  A human being on foot is many times more manuverable than a train.  Ergo, there are NO circumstances where it is the train’s fault when a pedestrian is hit by a train.

The Chicago Tribune Magazine had a cover story a couple weeks ago about the agony suffered by train engineers after they hit pedestrians.  Post-traumatic stress and so forth.  I know people who commit suicide are drowning in their own pain, but I wish they’d think about the pain they cause others in their last act.

I played around trains, too, and so did my kids.  I think we all understood that the train would kill us, so we were in a state of heightened awareness when the train was near.  Walkman headphones were decades in the future when I was a kid, though. 

Underdeveloped teenage brains - on the basis of that evidence I’d like to see a third tier of legal status for teens.  Something between “Juvenile” and “Adult” so teens who commit serious crimes could receive rehabilitation.

But I can’t put it all on underdeveloped teenage brains.  I have a friend who was hit by a truck while bicycling at 6:00 am… wearing headphones.  He was a 55-year-old high school teacher.  Presumably he was listening to NPR Morning Edition as he liked to do, but he can’t remember.  He did learn to walk again, though, and his speech is more understandable than it used to be.

I haven’t been in school for some time but I would hope that common household chemicals that go BOOM is covered in science class sometime before grade 10.  I want to hold some Adult to some form of resposiblity, where’d they get the gas?  But then again I Really hate stupid people!  I am also forced to ask just how high were these kids? did they bother to blood test for drugs?  I have heard of kids playing with gasoline burning themselves, but dousing onself with gas much less throwing matches/fire-crackers at your friend who has done so seems so Stupid I have trouble believe that people not intoxicated could pull it off.  Yet again the stupidity of the species disgusts me.

what a silly little bastard how bad are his burns