I wasn't going to comment on this.  I was going to leave it to the screeching, hypocritical talking heads like Stephen A. Smith and the hysterical back pages of the New York tabloids.  Yes, Plaxico Burress, star wide receiver for my beloved New York Football Giants, shot his own self with his own gun in a night club last Friday night.  Now, he's probably going to spend some time in jail for illegal gun possession.  What a dumbass, right?

Or, as Stephen A. Smith shouted in his column (yes, he even shouts in his columns):

"The embarrassing and precarious set of circumstances Burress finds himself in clearly are not an indication of the behavior exhibited by most players of any color in the NFL, particularly African-Americans. The vast majority of NFL players have some sense.

And it's a fact that those who have displayed their idiotic ways have paid dearly for it -- in dollars and jail time. Yet Burress still managed to screw up by placing himself, literally, in the line of fire despite the body of evidence flashing in players' faces as a deterrent."

It is all so predictable.  A superstar athlete runs afoul of the law, and is immediately followed by the cacophony of righteousness from the sports media and the law, with current New York City Mayor and member in good standing of the Lollipop Guild Mike Bloomberg demanding that Burress do hard time. 

But the problem is that Burress' immature behavior is, and always has been, inevitable.  Burress has been a star athlete since high school, and maybe even earlier.  When has anyone ever told him no?  Burress carried a gun because he was afraid of getting mugged because of all the jewelry he wore when he went out.  Burress had the gun in the club, even though the club doesn't allow weapons and knew that he had it on him.  They let him in anyway.  Then he accidentally shot himself and checked into a hospital under a fake name, where the hospital tried to cover for him by not reporting the gunshot wound to the police.

How about: don't get a gun, Plaxico: take the goddamn jewelry off instead.  Or: you can't come in with that gun, Mr. Burress, it's against the law.  And that is how it has gone his whole life.  Yes yes, whatever you want Plaxico, act like a goddamn child, just go out and catch them footballs real good!

I don't think he's dumb.  Intelligence is just a measure of how well you learn, not how much you know, and I'd say that Plaxico has learned what he has been taught pretty well: if you are rich, you can do whatever the hell you want.

Until you can't anymore.  That's the new lesson.