What Is The Appropriate Punishment For A Kid Ruining A 350-Year-Old Painting?

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Whether you’re standing in a two-hour line for a 20-second ride on the teacups or being marched through the Louvre so you can look at the Mona Lisa through 40-feet of glass, there’s a good chance that you think all of the other tourists around you are a-holes. But even the obese man with no deodorant standing on top of you in an elevator has nothing on the clueless, careless morons who walk into sacred places, monuments, or museums and destroy something priceless. There’s a special place in heck for those idiots, but what’s a valid punishment for them in the meantime?

The latest such scoundrel to defile a piece of art is a 12-year-old Taiwanese boy who tripped and fell at an art exhibit in Taipei and broke his fall by putting his hand through a 17th century painting valued at $1.5 million. He joins the California women who scratched their initials into the Colosseum for a selfie, the dynamic duo who shattered a statue of Hercules while also taking a selfie, the American who high-fived the finger off of a 14th century statue, and that student who got stuck in the vagina sculpture in the running for the unofficial title of the Worst Tourist of the Year.

However, because the painting is insured, the boy basically got off with the punishment of being really scared for a few hours. Should the punishment be greater for these clumsy, ignorant dorks? For answers, we turn to anchors Tom Storey and Briana Lane on today’s episode of The Desk.

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