A black couple who planned to spend their Memorial Day enjoying the beauty of nature found themselves at the wrong end of a gun barrel when a pistol-wielding white woman confronted them at a Mississippi campground.
According to WCBI, on Sunday, Franklin and Jessica Richardson planned a picnic outside of Starkville, Miss., at Oktibbeha County Lake, a destination for fishing, swimming and frolicking. I don’t quite know what “frolicking” means but I’ve seen white people do it at sunset in Corona commercials and it looks fun as hell. I kinda want to frolic, too.
In the commercials, one person of mixed race is allowed to accompany the Caucasian frolickers, which was probably the Richardsons’ fifth-biggest mistake, the first three being:
- Being black;
- Going camping in rural Mississippi;
- Not making a frolicking reservation.
Minutes after they arrived at the campground, run by Kampgrounds of America, the couple was confronted by a doppelganger Barbara Bush or a distant cousin of Lady Oleanna Tyrell, who was toting a pistol (In Mississippi, you “tote” pistols, you don’t “carry” them). That’s when Jessica decided she might want to record this video and post it on Facebook, just in case she and her husband inadvertently became stars in the documentary version of Deliverance.
“Not five mins later a truck pulls up and a white lady screams at us, she then jumps out of her truck with a Gun. And proceeded to point it at the 3 of us, simply because we didn’t make reservations,” Jessica wrote on the Facebook video’s caption.
In the video, the woman paces back and forth holding a rather large revolver as if she wanted them to be “vewwy, vewwy quiet,” because she was hunting wabbits. When the Richardsons tell the Kampgrounds of America property manager that they didn’t know they needed reservations, Thelma Fudd tells them to leave because the campground is under private ownership.
“Time stopped. Everything stopped. I was confused as to what was going on. It’s not like we posed a threat to anybody out there walking our dog. There’s nothing harmful about that,” Jessica Richardson told WCBI. “The fact that she used ‘get, get’ like we were a dog. You say get, get to a stray dog that’s on your porch. That ‘get, get’ got to me more than ‘you don’t belong here.’”
After scaring the suspicious negro frolickers, Yosemite Samantha finally puts her gun away, stuffing the firearm in the pocket of her Walmart twill shorts. The Richardsons say that they stopped by the reservation office on their way out, where they were told by the woman’s husband that no reservations were needed.
“The first thing he says is, ‘Oh, you don’t need a reservation for the lake.’” said Franklin Richardson. “Then, she pulls up flying, hops out of the car, then proceeded to yell at my wife, ‘Get in the car, you need to get back in the car,’ just cussing her out and she’s not even saying anything.”
If nothing else, this incident should serve as a valuable lesson to all black people:
- Camping is stupid: That’s why the ancient Egyptians invented a thing called “inside.” I go camping at hotels.
- Picnics are stupid: Unless a church is involved, picnics are always trash. The fried chicken skin is always cold and chewy. Flies and mosquitoes won’t leave you alone. And who the fuck knows where to find baskets?
- Going to Kampgrounds of America is stupid. I don’t know about the company’s reputation but, as a general rule, I tend not to get involved with organizations that gratuitously use the letter K. It just seems vaguely racist. That’s why I don’t mess with the Klan, the band Korn, Kappas, or Amerikkka.
- Mississippi is stupid: Aside from shooting a white person, there’s almost nothing you can do with a gun that’s illegal in Mississippi. It has the nation’s laxest gun laws and an aggressive “no duty to retreat” law. You don’t need a gun permit to own a gun. The state doesn’t even require that residents get a permit to carry a concealed weapon. That’s probably why the state has the fifth-highest rate of deaths by firearm in America, according to the Centers for Disease Control.
Meanwhile, Kampgrounds of America, which runs the campground, apologized for the incident and immediately fired the still-unidentified woman who might possibly be the love child of Daisy Duke and Boss Hogg, ABC reports (on the firing part, not the Daisy Duke pregnancy).
While this may sound like the plot of some Scooby Doo mystery where the park rangers are foiled by a crew of hapless picnickers and their dog, this is the real-life danger for people living in gun country. Somebody needs to tell Aunt Bea to put down the pistol before she shoots Opie, Andy or—even worse—Barney Fife.
And she would have gotten away with it if wasn’t for those frolicking negroes.