No Lesson Learned: The NFL Gun Culture Won't End With Plaxico Burress

NFL players are rattled right now. They play a sport that celebrates the air of invincibility and the indiscriminate use of violence to accomplish one's goals.

Yet, outside the workplace, they have come face-to-face with the evidence that the appearance of being bulletproof does not make them invincible, and they're realizing that they must protect themselves.

The deaths of Broncos cornerback Darrent Williams, Redskins safety Sean Taylor, and former Titans quarterback Steve McNair in violent gunshot attacks have players very conscious of their own mortality. This says nothing of the beating of Raiders receiver Javon Walker and the paralysis of Jaguars offensive tackle Richard Collier. Players are now aware that their careers, if not their lives, can be gone in an instant.

It's that very awareness that prompted Burress to take a loaded weapon with him to the Latin Quarter nightclub on November 28, 2008. Nine months later, Burress has pleaded guilty to criminal weapon possession charges and faces a 20-to-24-month jail sentence.

Meanwhile, in the NFL, what will change? Despite the awareness of the dangers awaiting them outside their front doors, the NFL is still a league of men aged 21 to 35 who live on adrenaline. It's not easy to tell these guys that they need to stay home at night.

Walk into your typical nightclub, and you're walking into a combustible mix of things that should be approached with great caution. Testosterone and alcohol can easily create a dangerous situation by themselves, especially in a club environment where no one wants to look weak in front of onlooking females. The danger increases exponentially when deadly weapons are introduced into the situation, especially by a well-known athlete.

As Steelers QB Ben Roethlisberger said in a 2008 ESPN The Magazine article, "Depending on the setting, you get guys who just get really gutsy when they get a couple of drinks in them."

The swagger of an NFL athlete, however, dictates that they not back down in the face of aggressively "gutsy" fans. They must be prepared for something to jump off. Unfortunately, preparing for something to happen can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Going in armed can lead to a mindset that says, "If anything goes down, I'm prepared to draw first." That mindset can easily increase the likelihood of an incident, rather than reduce it.

In a 2003 article in the New York Times, former offensive tackle Lomas Brown said "almost every player I knew" owned and carried a gun. None of this is likely to change in the wake of the Burress sentencing.

It can be hoped that players will, however, take the time to consult their attorneys on the gun laws in their area, as Plaxico would have been well-advised to do.

Burress's defenders argue that there was no "criminal intent" behind Plax carrying a gun, but in New York, carrying an unregistered firearm is a criminal act. Burress not knowing that fact does not excuse it, as ignorance of the law is not a legal defense.

It's easy to paint the NFL's players as a crazed pack of gun-toting scofflaws, due to the large media coverage of athletes' legal issues. However, the San Diego Union-Tribune noted in 2008 that NFL players, from 2000 through April of 2008, were a better-behaved lot than society at large.

The general U.S. population was arrested at a rate of one for every 21 people.

NFL players during that time frame were arrested at a rate of 1 in 47, including practice-squad players and those on injured reserve.

To repeat a point, athletes do know that they have quite a bit to lose. There is a need, however, for players to educate and prepare themselves in better fashions. Roethlisberger, as well as former Giants RB and current NBC News reporter Tiki Barber, is public about hiring off-duty police officers for security purposes when he goes out.

Far from making an athlete look weak, having accredited security personnel watching one's back instead of a bunch of friends from the neighborhood is a smart maneuver. That way, a player doesn't go about preparing to defend himself from losing everything in a manner that causes him to take it all away from himself.

Teach Your Children: The Lesson of Steve McNair

It's been almost a week since the murder of former Titans QB Steve McNair, and the outpouring of grief seems to be slowly subsiding in the Nashville area, where I write this.

Words of praise for McNair's toughness as an athlete and his civic-minded devotion to his community pour over the TV and radio airwaves day and night, as well they should. So, too, do the recriminations from people who stop just short of claiming that McNair deserved what he got for his adulterous affair with Sahel Kazemi. They may quote Scripture, they may cry for his children, or they may simply condemn the rest of the populace for giving a famous athlete a pass.

Either way, anyone who would come anywhere close to inferring that something like this qualifies as "just desserts" is quite far from pious. Public disgrace, loss of his family, a financial hit from a hefty divorce settlement, maybe those things would have been somewhat deserved had his relationship been unearthed some other way.

But death?

Really?

No matter what your faith, it's quite hard to justify a belief that any other human being deserves to die.

There are those trying to use Steve McNair as a bully pulpit to pound a fundamentalist view down the throats of their fellow man. It's sad that there are people who can use a public figure's murder to further their own agenda, but such is life these days, where any publicity is good publicity.

Rather than use this to try and bludgeon strangers with Judeo-Christian propaganda, what we should be focusing on is using Steve McNair as a teaching tool for our children, especially those children old enough to recognize and appreciate what the man did on the field.

It's okay to praise McNair for his on-field skill and his community involvement. It really is. At the same time, we can use McNair's murder to explain the emotional impact of interpersonal relationships. Weaving a web as tangled as the one McNair seemed to be building can have dire consequences in the wrong circumstances.

Athletes are frequently held up as role models for their work ethic and toughness, and Steve McNair fits right near the top of those lists. Parents, however, need to also observe an athlete's personal misdeeds and treat them as ways to explain what not to do. It all falls under the category of "teaching right from wrong," doesn't it?

No matter what Charles Barkley might have said back in the day, all professional athletes are role models, both for the good and the bad. It's unfortunate, though, that Steve McNair's truest value as a role model may lie in the cautionary tale that will be told of his death.