As a star of the Jackass films and of his own show on MTV, Bam Margera has made a good living off low-brow stunts, pranking anybody and everybody, and generally causing chaos in front of cameras.
Last week, he did more of the same, tweeting a picture of himself holding a gun to a puppy’s head. The tweet read: “Penny pooped in my bed. Not too fond of that. If it happens again, Penny goes Bye Byes.”
Penny, as you can see, is an adorable Pit Bull puppy. Bam, as you can also see, is a wild-eyed, tattooed hellraiser.
The outcry was immediate. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, “SPCA spokesman Rich Britton called the picture ‘not funny’ and said that, even for a shock comedian, Margera ‘missed the mark on this one.'”
Margera has 820,000 Twitter followers. He’s a sort of anti-hero to legions of young people, some of them impressionable kids, who look upon his fame with admiration and envy. They’ve been known to do what he does, even the dumb things he does.
Fortunately, Margera seems to understand how stupid the whole thing was.
He quickly began apologizing, especially when informed of the recent animal abuse cases in his home region of Chester County, PA.
“I think those people need to go down,” he said of the abusers. “Just hurting another animal is rude, crude, and more.”
The gun, incidentally, is fake. Bam told the Inquirer that he wished he had made that clear to his Twitter followers.
In an interview with Fox 29, Bam said, “Sorry if I offended anybody. But I’m an animal lover and I’d never hurt this dog in a million years, and the gun is a fake gun.”
“I didn’t want to offend anybody. I just wanted to make people laugh,” he said. “I just like to joke around. I would never ever in a million years hurt a dog or a cat or any animal.”
In addition to the puppy, Bam has six cats — Eric the Cat, Trouble, Mischief, Wall Crawl, Peaches, and Twanda Newton Harris.
This is a sorry chapter in Bam’s strange life, but it seems to be simply a joke gone bad. We hope he can turn this into something positive for animals — he can start with those 820,000 followers on Twitter.
