Adding The Vapors To Tragedy

The murder of Redskins’ safety Sean Taylor was a senseless, stupid tragedy, of course.  It seems to have been a hot burglary gone horribly awry; the four suspects apparently broke into Taylor’s Fort Meyers (FL) home intending to pilfer stuff.  Taylor surprised them, they allegedly shot him, and he died after apparently bleeding out.

The story has many victims – Taylor’s son and family, friends and teammates. 

And, farther down the list of victims, we can add “rationality” and “logic”.

I don’t turn to Sports Illustrated for informed commentary about politics or current events.  But stupidity is stupidity is stupidity:

A sad part of the story, of course, is a child growing up fatherless, for no good reason. But another sad part, and one that will make good people across the NFL cringe, is that [Taylor’s teammate Chris] Samuels, a gentlemen among gentleman, will be applying for a permit to own a gun this week.

Um…huh?

Taking responsibility for defending oneself from society’s scum is the opposite of being a “gentleman among gentlemen?”

That someone would take it upon him/herself to resist being a victim, to tacitly tell the world’s criminal scum “I will be at the very least a speed bump, if not a surprise bridge abutment, on your road as a thug” is a “sad part of the story?”

“I was always scared of guns growing up,” Samuels said. “But this situation has told me I need one. I’d rather be prepared than to be like Sean was, and not have a gun in his house when he really needed it. I’m going to go through all the proper procedures, get a license, get training for it, and have it in my house, where I lay my head at night.

Reading between the lines, it’d seem Samuels is going to get a Florida carry permit – which, like the system in Minnesota (and 35 other states) requires the applicant to show a clean criminal, substance abuse and violent mental illness record, and take a training course to enforce competence and knowledge of applicable law.

Tragedy?  Hell, no – it’s a victory.  When law-abiding citizen (and the piece in SI works overtime to show Samuels is not one of the caricaturish thugs that infest the NFL today) that decides to draw that line in the sand and say “me and mine are off limits, thugs”, it sends the message our society’s layer of criminal scum need to hear; that you are one bad choice from having your chest cavity blown out through your shoulder blades, and than you should think twice about your chosen vocation.

“I wish a lot of people thought like I did, that violence is bad. But unfortunately that’s not the way the world is. Sometimes the world is not a nice place. It’s sad I have to get a gun.”

And that’s yet another tragedy of Sean Taylor’s death.

No, it’s a rescue of three bits of good news from a senseless tragedy; he’s another armed, law-abiding citizen. 

 He’s a role model that other law-abiding citizens can use to get over the stigma that the nannymedia has labored to put on the law-abiding gun owner these last four decades.

And finally, it’s another journalist exposed as the patriarchal nannystater he is.

10 thoughts on “Adding The Vapors To Tragedy

  1. They were playing sound bites of Jesse Jackson speaking at the funeral. Was he eulogizing Taylor? No, of course not he was pimpimg for the anti-gun lobby.

  2. I still can’t get past this part:

    “”But another sad part, and one that will make good people across the NFL cringe,””

    ‘Good people’ . . . . I can see how someone may think it is sad that one may have to own a gun because they feel the need to protect themselves in an environment you should feel safe in, your home. But it isn’t sad in and of itself to own a handgun. Frankly, it s sad that, in the case of Taylor, he didn’t own one.

    “it sends the message our society’s layer of criminal scum need to hear;””

    BINGO!!

    Flash

  3. Orthogonally: lots of folks who aren’t involved in the self-defense movement don’t really have any idea as to what’s involved, legally, in owning a gun. And I don’t just mean reporters, either, although by and large they’ve got a large learning curve on the issues — I was asked by a cop, recently, “is your gun registered?” (No, I explained; we don’t have gun registration in Minnesota. Trust me; I wrote the book on the subject.)

    I’m not talking about the legal requirements for self-defense; just what is legally required for somebody to buy a firearm.

    It’s entirely possible, for example, that Chris Samuels would think that he would be legally required to get a license to keep a gun in his home in Florida. (He wouldn’t.) In fact, he’s going beyond what the law requires by getting training. (I think it’s a good idea, mind you, but, then again, I would.)

    If he wants to go beyond having his gun in his home or car (Florida has very liberal laws on such; good for them), and get his Florida carry permit, he could take any DNR hunter safety class, or any firearms safety class taught by any NRA Instructor, although he sounds like a very responsible guy, and is likely to do something like NRA Personal Protection.

    Sounds, as you suggest, like this horrible even has spurred at least one friend of the late Mr. Taylor to take a modest, reasonable step to see to his own safety. And that’s a good thing.

  4. I think it’s interesting that the SI would take a chance on offending a potentially large part of their audience. A lot of people who watch NFL games (and who might buy SI to read about them) might very well support armed self-defense, whether or not they are actively involved in it. It’s not like they’re writing this for PBS or MPR.
    It might not be the most cheerful thing in the world to contemplate the realistic need for, and use of, serious self-protection measures – but it’s surely better than having to rely on only the goodwill of armed bad guys. That gloomy Gus writer needs to cheer up and look on the sunny side.

  5. “It’s entirely possible, for example, that Chris Samuels would think that he would be legally required to get a license to keep a gun in his home in Florida.”

    You mean that all those incidents where CSI Miami broke the case, because the gun they found was registered to so-and-so, were lies?

  6. Peter King also appears on Sunday’s NBC pre-game show “Football Night in America.” I can imagine the off-air demagoguery exchanged between he and co-host Keith Olbermann.

  7. jdege: no; they were fiction.

    The tracing of a gun through gun registration as a way of breaking the case is a staple of fiction. It doesn’t quite never happen in real life, but it’s exceedingly rare, for the obvious reasons.

    As we all know, Bob, for the trace — either through purchase records to the person who purchased it new from a FFL dealer, or through a gun registration database (like they have in NYC, Michigan, and a few other places, although not as many as folks think) — to “break” a case requires something approaching a whodunnit in the first place, and then some sort of close connection between the original purchaser/registrant and the actual criminal. The combination of the two is very, very rare; murderers very rarely use guns they’ve bought both legally and new or have registered for murder.

  8. PaulC — I dunno. Generally speaking, gun owners develop a fairly thick skin when it comes to ignorant throwaways in their infotainment; we kind of have to.

    Beyond that, armed self-defense isn’t really controversial, by and large. If it was, we wouldn’t have modern, mainstream, commonsense “shall issue” carry laws in the vast majority of states, and the antis getting increasingly desperate in the few holdouts, and over SCOTUS taking on the DC case.

    (We’ll get Wisconsin in 2011, I think, although Illinois will be a long haul. I’ve long been of the opinion that getting California to go “shall issue” is just a matter of time, grass-roots organizing, and money; their initiative process pretty guarantees that if you can get enough of those three, you can get it done. But it won’t be cheap; buying enough airtime to counterbalance the free disinformation that the antis get to disseminate through the MSM will cost, at least, many tens of millions of dollars, even assuming good grassroots and viral activism.)

  9. My wife reported to me that a news program was covering how tragic this was for the families of the accused murderers. I say no, their tragedy came before this one.

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