In the perfect example of what not to do when your teen daughter gets in a physical fight with another 14-year-old girl, Virianda Alvarez, 33, pulled a gun on the young girl in the fight “to scare her.” After the gun-to-the-head incident was caught on video, Alvarez was arrested and charged with aggravated assault.
While every parent hopes that your child will never get into a fight, especially over something as silly as the opposite sex, there are literally dozens of ways for a parent to intervene withoutputting a gun to a child’s head. That’s just unbelievable.
The teens’ fight began in a park near Pasadena High School in Houston, where the girls attend as students. Earlier in the day, the two girls had confronted each other over a boy. One girl challenged the other to a fight after school, and Alvarez came along packing heat.
The raw footage of the aggravated assault was captured on a cell phone video:
Though Alvarez, a supposedly responsible parent, put a gun to a young girl’s head to “scare” her into letting her daughter win the fight, her defense was that the gun wasn’t loaded. Alvarez says she always carries a gun in her purse for intimidation.
Well, that’s reassuring. Sadly, it is parents like this who give Texas a bad name — reinforcing the stereotype that we are all pistol-packing freaks who will pull a gun any chance we get. As a Texas parent who has witnessed responsible gun ownership, I consider what this mother did to be unconscionable. There’s no way that a weapon should be carried into a crowd of teenagers, loaded or unloaded. There’s no way that pulling a gun on a teen girl is the best way to defuse a violent situation.
A school district officer soon arrived to the scene to break up the fistfight, after Alvarez had returned the gun to her purse. Alvarez is being held in Harris County Jail on a $35,000 bond. The two girls involved in the fight have been suspended until Monday and will participate in a five-day guidance program.
As parents, our kids watch and observe literally everything we do. I can only imagine the stress of seeing your teenager get punched by another student because I haven’t been there yet. But I can confidently say that this could have been a teachable moment where Alvarez stepped in and forced both girls to face the consequences of their actions. A mother pulling a gun in a fistfight is like putting gasoline on a fire — she set a terrible example for her daughter and only made the fight worse.
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