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Plaxidental shooting

Last Friday, New York football Giants wide receiver Plaxico Burress took a gun into a New York City nightclub and accidentally shot himself in the leg while he was fumbling with his gun in one hand and holding a glass of wine in the other. He went to the hospital shortly afterwards, and turned himself in to police on Monday. The police had been looking for him at various hospitals to charge him with two counts of illegal possession of a firearm.

I am apparently the only one around here who sees the arrest, trial, and imprisonment of gun owners as the fascist, police-state crimes that they are. Can you believe the nonchalant and unquestioning attitude with which most people talk about “gun crimes,” without even stopping to think, much less discuss, the right of the State to restrict gun ownership and use as much as it wants? No government or any other body of people has any right to restrict the purchase, ownership, possession, or use of a firearm, beyond what our natural right of self-defense allows.

It is (or, should be) the purview of the night club owners and only the night club owners what types of firearms are allowed on their premises. They let him in with his gun, knowing full well that he was carrying it, so that was their decision. The property owners, and the people who went onto the property expecting their person and property to be safe, are certainly in a position to object to someone’s brandishing or firing of a gun, because even threatening, much less shooting, other people except in self-defense is completely indefensible. If Plaxico Burress had ever endangered anyone other than himself with the gun, that would be another matter entirely. Perhaps the club’s lawyers could press charges against him for scaring or threatening its guests and giving it a bad reputation or something. But he didn’t even pull his gun out of his pants (or wherever it was). He did nothing wrong to anyone else.

The ESPN.com article says, “Burress had a concealed-weapon permit issued to him in Florida, but records show it expired in May and New York does not recognize out-of-state permits anyway, New York media have reported.” It apparently doesn’t recognize any redeeming qualities in the Second Amendment or the innate rights it refers to, either.

Burress faces 3.5 to 15 years in prison for the laws he broke. Can you believe that? What an appalling, depressing, enraging authoritarian police state we live in! I am left almost speechless by the unquestioning, matter-of-fact attitude with which the rest of this country—this world!—accepts fascist laws that treat non-aggressing people as potential criminals to be caged and constrained and mothered and regulated until they can’t do anything without the State’s explicit permission.

Posted in Gun control, Sports