A few weeks back, I was in Los Angeles where I saw Wafaa Bilal, an Iraqi artist, give a talk about an installation he did called, “Shoot An Iraqi.” He had lost both his brother and his father in Iraq due to the war. In order to work out his grief, incite dialog, and make a commentary on remote killing, he set up a room that he would stay in for thirty days with a paint gun hooked up to a computer, where people could go online, read his story, use a web cam and a servo-remote-mechanism hooked up to his computer and shoot him. He did this for THIRTY DAYS! He videotaped nearly all of it. There was one day where the gun was going off furiously and he couldn’t re-fill the pain ball magazine fast enough. I found this to be really disturbing on so many levels.

Why am I relating this to you? Because you have given your partners enough ammo to make their point. Stop feeding the gun and, in fact, leave the room. Everyone has proven their point and learned their lessons — anything else is just overkill.