:rolleyes: I have a cousin who was killed by a drunk driver. Let’s abolish cars.
From what I understand, his gun was unlicensed. All he had to do was to license it and he’d be a “law-abiding citizen.” Since he didn’t, he wasn’t law abiding.
Doesn’t sound like such a travesty to me. He broke a fairly easy to understand law. Simply make sure the gun was licensed.
Personally I’m also of two minds - seems a harsh price to pay for shooting yourself. I was actually shocked that jail time was even possible. Esp. the minimum of 3 years or whatever.
But how fucking stupid is he, anyway? I mean, why go to a place where you feel you need to have a loaded gun in the first place? He was on the injured list too - shouldn’t he be recuperating? Shows absolutely zero respect for his team, his sport, his family (he’s got a wife and young kids). Part of me feels for that, screw him, he doesn’t deserve the adulation and money he’s been given. And if he has to go to jail, so be it.*
*yes I know, we all do stupid things and jail is probably not recommended purely for stupidity.
You should be more or less right, but you’re not, not in NYC. In NYC, for all practical purposes, a law abiding citizen CAN’T get a permit to carry a gun. That’s what I’m talking about.
…with the safety off.
I hadn’t heard about Burress having any legal trouble, but apparently, his wife called the cops for a domestic disturbance in August and again in September.
Ah, hell. In for a penny, in for a pound…
Not all handguns have manual safeties. In fact, I would venture to say that most of them do not. That in and of itself is not a big deal, in spite of its repetition in this thread as a shocking thing. The safety is the user, which speaks volumes for Plaxico.
Okay, now I know.
Sure does.
This is correct. In order to get a carry permit in NYC you need to have a very good reason. So, if your job is to transport diamonds around the five boroughs, you can get a carry permit. If you’re Salman Rushdie and there are a dozen Imams with bounties on your head, you *might *be able to get a carry permit. However, if you’re a recognizable football player who likes going to clubs and is understandably a little wary of the yahoos who might want to cause trouble, then you’re out of luck.
. . . which is not to say that Plaxico was justified in breaking the law in this case, and certainly he shouldn’t be carrying a gun in the waistband of his *sweatpants *(:smack:).
Speaking of which, here’s the Daily Show’s take on this. I like the song at the end.
Or, you could make driving drunk illegal, but I suppose that answer won’t fully stuff that strawman you’re making.
Even though Plaxico was an otherwise (mostly) law abiding citizen, not allowing him to carry a gun into a NYC nightclub seems to have been the right choice. He is not a good gun owner, not responsible, and placed everyone in that nightclub at risk. His case highlights why people get nervous around gun carriers. His inattentiveness puts everyone at risk.
Sure, similar risks exist on the roadway, but we all HAVE to take that risk in order to travel from place to place at decent speeds. I don’t have to take on the risk of a gun owner accidentally killing me in order to live a modern life, it’s a risk thrust upon me by the choices of others. Life is full of risks, but that doesn’t mean that we should accept any and all risk as an unavoidable part of life, or consider all risks “equal”.
They’re not equal, that’s why you need a permit to carry and that’s also why he’ll be doing time (hopefully) for this act of indiscretion.
The stupidity of carrying a gun w/o a license aside, I’m still trying to wrap my head around how idiotic you’ve got to be to actually shoot yourself. What in the world was he doing… fingering the trigger while it was in his pocket? He actually had an automatic round chambered or one coming up in a revolver? That’s just so damn dumb, especially if you’re out in public. I would think that if you have, or at least at one time had, a license to carry that you’d have gone through some kind of safety and sensibility training.
Oh, and anyone that got to miss Rosenhaus’ pity party on MNF, expressing how distraught he was to go through this again after last year’s ordeal with another one of his clients, Sean Taylor… consider yourself fortunate. It was disgusting and his input was useless.
Apparently the gun was in the waistband of his sweatpants. It started to slip down his leg and when he tried to grab it, I guess he squeezed the trigger.
You mean he was allowing the elastic or the string of his pant to secure a loaded weapon? Where’s jarbaby. I need a “holy flurking schmidt!”
You need a permit to drive a car too, and we accept as a given that everyone has the right to drive a car until they prove that they can’t handle the responsibility, yet extending the same logic to one of our Constitutionally guaranteed rights seems to be some strange type of nuanced thinking beyond the ken of many people, this despite the fact that cars kill half again as many people as guns each year. (Stats are available here, just select “all intents” and then “Firearm” or “Motor vehicle, overall”. 30K vs 45K)
I just don’t understand it, and I utterly reject Cheesesteak’s argument above. The right to protect one’s person and family (and I would say property, although I understand many people wouldn’t) is far more basic and fundamental than the convenience of being able to drive where you want to go. The only explanation that I have been able to come up with is that opposition to guns comes from fear, not fact. If you parse the numbers I linked to above a bit further, you’ll see that , 17K of the 30K firearm deaths were from suicide. While tragic, suicide deaths are not a danger to innocent bystanders, leaving us with “real” numbers of 45K to 13K. Dude, cars are between 3 and 4 times more likely to kill you than guns. If you further factor out gun deaths to criminals due to criminal activity (which the cite above can’t do) the number drops even further.
All that being said, I’m not making the argument that society should keep guns and ditch cars, or vice versa, or anything at all comparing the two, really. My point is that it is no more logical to point to Plexiglas shooting himself in the leg as a justification to ban guns than it is to use my cousin’s death as a reason to ban cars.
Your statistics of course fall apart fast when you look at the number of cars on the road vs. the number of gun owners I believe.
Not that I really care much either way. I am neither pro nor con guns and I still think Plax is an absolute fucking idiot of epic proportions and is leaving a trail of woe behind him from his compounded mistakes. Plax is a moron and now a bar, Pierce and some Hospital employees are all facing potential criminal charges for making the mistake of helping out a selfish idiot.
Good point:
Cars: 204 Million. in 2003, cite
Guns: Between 238 million and 276 million. Or 200 million +. Or some other number, depending on the source, none of which I’ve ever seen use a number lower than 200 million. cite
Gun owners “almost half of all households”, which puts the number somewhere between 60 and 80 million. cite
Not as big a disparity as one might think, but immaterial to this thread, which is that Burress is an idiot. Anyone want to dispute that?
Yet somehow, folks who live in places where gun carrying is illegal (NYC, UK, etc) still manage to struggle through another day of life without basic liberties. Clearly, they would all be much better off if cars were banned and guns allowed, I can only imagine the paradise THAT would be.
Edited to add, if you can also provide a cite that 100 million of those guns are actively used for extended periods of time every single day (like cars are), then I’ll buy that guns are as safe as cars.
Plaxico is an idiot for doing this. That’s out of the way.
Can ESPN push this just a little more? The moral outrage that you hear from the WWL is a bit ridiculous in this case. Sal Paolantonio (hack) was on the radio talking about the embarrassment this has caused to one of the founding teams of the NFL, like the Giants were going to have to shut down because of this. Really? More than LT snorting most of the cocaine available in NYC when he was living there?
They really need to come off their high horse on that. Compared to some of the other things that have happened this decade in the NFL (see: Lewis, Ray or Lewis, Jamal), this really isn’t that big of a deal. You’d think he shot someone else.
Sure think. Most gun lovers have a bunch of them. Compare families with cars to families with guns are you come to the truth. Lot more families with cars.
You wish to dispute that Burress is an idiot? Pray tell, on what grounds?
Besides, Plax is used to ditching safeties.
Ok, there’s no way I’m the first person to make that joke, right?