{"id":1736,"date":"2007-12-04T05:44:59","date_gmt":"2007-12-04T10:44:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1736"},"modified":"2007-12-04T05:44:59","modified_gmt":"2007-12-04T10:44:59","slug":"adding-the-vapors-to-tragedy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=1736","title":{"rendered":"Adding The Vapors To Tragedy"},"content":{"rendered":"

The murder of Redskins’ safety Sean Taylor<\/a> was a senseless, stupid tragedy, of course.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Taylor surprised them, they allegedly shot him, and he died after apparently bleeding out.<\/p>\n

The story has many victims – Taylor’s son and family, friends and teammates.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And, farther down the list of victims, we can add “rationality” and “logic”.<\/p>\n

I don’t turn to Sports Illustrated for informed commentary about politics or current events.\u00a0 But stupidity is stupidity is stupidity<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Um…huh?<\/p>\n

Taking responsibility for defending oneself from society’s scum is the opposite of being a “gentleman among gentlemen?”<\/p>\n

That someone would take it upon him\/herself to resist being a victim, <\/em>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”\u00a0<\/em>is a “sad part of the story?”<\/p>\n

“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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Tragedy?\u00a0 Hell, no – it’s a victory.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

“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.”<\/p>\n

And that’s yet another tragedy of Sean Taylor’s death.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

No, it’s a rescue of three bits of good news from a senseless tragedy; he’s another armed, law-abiding citizen.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0He’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.<\/p>\n

And\u00a0finally, it’s another journalist exposed as the patriarchal nannystater he is.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The murder of Redskins’ safety Sean Taylor was a senseless, stupid tragedy, of course.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Taylor surprised them, they allegedly shot him, and he died after apparently bleeding out. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,22],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-war","category-victim-disarmament"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1736"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1736\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}