The Pittsburgh shooting

Yesterday I approvingly quoted Charles Blow's op-ed about how the wingnuts are really starting to come loose, but I'm still a little uncomfortable with the use of the 23 year-old skinhead cop killer in Pittsburgh as evidence of that trend.

My objection is not that it's necessarily unseemly to "play politics" with tragedy, and pretty much all shootings seem like good arguments for gun control to me. But the pool of people who actually go on shooting rampages is thankfully too small and too fucked up to extrapolate much from their politics. It may be a cliche ("crazies on both sides"), but it seems that taking it seriously means really not caring which websites a person was posting on before they started shooting at the cops.

The argument about which political ideology is intrinsically brutal and crazy is easily winnable without deploying actual murdering psychopaths as data points.

That's not very gangster

Reading ESPN (the worldwide leader in coverage of controversial black athletes), it turns out shooting himself in the leg was a very bad thing for Plaxico Burress to have done. I mean it's obviously something that one should studiously avoid doing but for an NFL wide receiver in particular, it's bad. A short list of the consequences:

- Getting charged with criminal possession of a weapon.
- Possibly getting put on the non-football related injury list, which would mean he couldn't return and wouldn't get paid.
- Badly damaging the repeat chances of a 10-1 Giants team.

And I'm sure there are more. This is on top of what must be the lingering discomfort of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Personally I think injuries sustained in nightclub violence should really be covered by the NFL's workman's comp package.