Tell you what, those Russians sure do know how to party.
A wedding party that put a whole new meaning behind “doing shots” Sunday walked away with only $3 fines after firing guns from car windows as they sped around the Moscow’s main avenues near Red Square.
A red Ferrari lead the motorcade followed by all kinds of other luxury cars driven by people from the Caucasus region of Russia, where much like rednecks in the U.S., people shoot off guns to celebrate weddings and other special holidays.
Hospitable Moscow. Drive-and-shoot luxury car motorcade wedding guests from Russia’s south released with fines for tinted car windows.
— Valery Levchenko (@ValeryLev) September 30, 2012
The Kremlin is pissed off (okay, we know, they’re always pissed off), especially after the wedding guests walked away with the chicken feed fines. Ethnic Russians are also mad, saying they don’t like the gun-firing wedding tradition brought from the province of Dagestah, where a majority of the residents are Muslims.
The judges’ reaction is especially surprising since this is the same country that threw little-girl punk band Pussy Riot in prison for two years for a punk prayer song against he-man leader Vladimir Putin.
Vladimir Zhirinovsky, leader of Liberal Democratic Party, said that it might be a “sign of joy” for people from the Caucasus to shoot guns to celebrate, but “here it’s a sign of robbery, banditry.” He wants people who shoot guns for joy to go to prison for two years. But Sergei Zheleznyak of the pro-Kremlin United Russia party said people like that should go for 15 days and get a huge fine.
“Meager fines for hooliganism with the use of firearms are a mockery of law and common sense.”
It’s not that easy though. The mostly Muslim natives from the Caucasus provinces flooded into western Russia after the USSR collapsed in 1991, and have formed ethnic gangs noted for their cruelty, so it’s probably a good thing they weren’t aiming hteir guns while they were shooting near Red Square.
And Russians don’t like the Caucasus people, where much of the region is poor except for provincial leaders and officials flaunt their wealth, drive cars like Ferraris, and throw expensive weddings that involve, apparently, shooting off guns.