Athletes, Guns and Money

New York Giants' wide receiver Plaxico Burress got himself shot yesterday and got himself arrested today. The shooting was accidental; nothing that happens after this will be. Burress has been charged with two counts of criminal possession of a firearm. Under his new contract with the Giants, he could be cut from the team and forfeit much of the remaining salary. Under league policy, he could be suspended without pay, indefinitely, interrupting or even ending his playing career. Under state law, he could face a mandatory minimum sentence of three and one-half years. Burress' entire livelihood could be lost from this one incident.

And what was this incident? Burress isn't charged with injuring someone or even with carrying a weapon with malicious intent. His conduct (carrying a weapon) is perfectly legal. What he did wrong was fail to get permission. He violated a mere regulation.

If Burress does indeed suffer the full gamut of possible consequences, the fault lies only in part with him. It also lies with the absurd policies of the NFL and the state of New York concerning the possession of handguns.

1. What many media commentators and many of those who shape public policy fail to understand is why a star athlete like Burress might rationally choose to carry a handgun. The most obvious motive is protection. Athletes are targets: coming from and venturing back into neighborhoods blighted by crime, their high public stature and published wealth must ineluctably draw avaricious stares from thieves. The seemingly frequent news of another athlete being attacked and robbed testifies to the predicament of life as a public star. The response that a pro athlete should never venture into a dangerous place (and thus never have need for a gun) is facile and wrong: any public venue, even a restaurant or cinema, might house potential danger. Should a star athlete turn his back on the neighbors and friends of his youth? Just buy a mansion in a gated community and live inside the walls? In any realistic sense, an athlete will venture out, and it stands to reason that a handgun might be needed for protection. The paucity of news reports describing the use of a gun for protection might suggest such uses are rare; it might also suggest that a thief stopped in his tracks or deterred from even starting is not the kind of news that will bubble to the surface and make its way onto the evening telecast. Such beneficial uses of guns probably go underreported.

(2. I heard one prominent former pro athlete say he would never carry a handgun. No, it turns out he hired private security people, themselves armed, to accompany him. How is that all that different? If guns are so dangerous and wrong, why have them along? The answer is they're needed, if only as a deterrent.)

3. But the justification to carry a firearm doesn't rest on a hypothesized utilitarian claim; it's more profound. Deep within the American sports tradition are the "manly sports," a term no longer in vogue but not without significance. The manly sports, like bare-knuckle fighting, boxing, wrestling, fencing, marksmanship and the like were once very popular. Men engaged in manly sports for no utilitarian reason: not (at first) for prizes or fame or enhancement of martial arts. No, men engaged in these sports simply as an expression of manliness, out of simple preference. When my brother and I were teenagers my father, in an act unthinkable in today's world, bought us boxing gloves: the best gift ever. We and our friends spent many a winter's night in our basement, basically punching the heck out of each other. Was this "useful" in some sense, to protect us from bullies or prepare us for fighting unforeseen wars? Not really. It was just fun, the kind of fun boys love to have. It was just sport for its own sake, not for any purpose other than itself, a simple, direct expression of what it meant for us to be young men.

4. It's the utilitarians who eliminated or curtailed the manly sports. Sports are lawful today only if they're useful in some greater sense. Bare-knuckle fighting used to be popular; the utilitarians (sitting on judicial benches) came to the opinion that such fights served no purpose and tended to incite breaches of the public decorum. Thus fighting was outlawed and slowly converted to boxing (itself actually more dangerous, as the gloves were added to protect the hands, not the face, and thus permit harder blows), not initially through legislation, but through judicial decisions holding fighters acting within the rules of the sport to have committed torts or even crimes against their voluntary, consenting opponents. To survive the scrutiny of the utilitarians, sports had to prove they were useful in some sense apart from the sheer pleasure of the sport itself. Not many manly sports can survive this scrutiny. We see this very phenomenon going on today with respect to hunting: to justify hunting, contemporary hunters' groups point to the "usefulness" of the sport as a means of providing food for the table or thinning overrunning animal populations. Hunting as "harvesting" or "wildlife control." Why can't we say that hunting is fun, that it appeals in some indescribable way to many (men, for the most part) in our population, and call that justification enough?

Further, why does the preference to bear arms need a justification, any more than does any other constitutional right? The point of putting rights in the constitution was to eliminate the need to convince people that this preference is a good or useful one. Why do arms-bearers have to make the case that free-speakers or free-religionists don't?

5. Which brings us back to Plaxico Burress, today's poor hounded subject of the swarming round-the-clock, tabloid journalism in which ESPN is starting to specialize. Why did he possess a gun? For the same reason that men like to purchase guns, and fire them, and use them to provide added protection or shoot targets or bring down game. Because he wanted to, as a man. No further justification is possible for manly pursuits, and no more explanation is desirable: you either understand it or you don't. It's a man thing. And that so many media commentators can't make a distinction between Burress doing a perfectly lawful thing, had he had the requisite permission, and the other crimes that athletes and others commit that involve assaults against comparatively defenseless persons is a reflection on the media, not the athlete. If the media don't understand manly sports or manly pursuits then how is that the fault of the man?

(And why did the overbearing police feel the need to "perp walk" Burress on the street in handcuffs for the benefit of national television? I'm sure he would have been happy to surrender to authorities at the time and place of their choosing. Why the felt need to take the public figure, the innocent person, down a peg, all without a trial by jury? Envy is never a pretty emotion to see in action.)

6. I'm not saying Burress shouldn't be punished. But let's be clear: Burress' crime is what is called a regulatory crime, or a crime malum prohibitum. It's a crime just because we (that is, the State of New York) say it is. It's not a crime because it's wrong in some profound sense, what the law used to term male in se, wrong in and of itself. New York is using a criminal sanction to enforce a regulation, the regulation being that arms-bearers in New York have to have a permit. (Some legal commentators think that the criminal sanction, society's most serious, should never be used for mere regulatory purposes.) So must people who plan to stage a parade or a protest. We have a right to protest, but we must do it with lawful permission. Martin Luther King, for example, once staged a protest without a permit. His consequence? He spent a single night in the Birmingham jail. (And by the way, that particular restriction on protesting was later held unconstitutional.) But Burress will get over three years and the loss of his livelihood? Sure, MLK had greater things in mind, but that's not my point of comparison: both King and Burress exercised a constitutional right, albeit one that had to be exercised with restriction; both violated the restriction, and both got or will get punished. But the crime is a minor one at most, and the public reaction should be commensurate.