Boston Celtics Hall of Fame center William F. “Bill” Russell apologized Oct. 21 for the carrying of a loaded .38 Smith & Wesson revolver that led to his Oct. 16 arrest at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
The basketball great was taken upstairs to an office of the Sea-Tac Airport police department, where he was booked, background checked and issued a citation for having in illegal weapon at the airport. While prosecutors decide how to handle the misdemeanor, the 79-year-old was free to fly to Boston where Nov. 1 he will unveil a bronze statue of himself.
“Before boarding my flight from Seattle to Boston, I had accidentally left a legal firearm in my bag. I apologize and truly regret the mistake,” said the center in a statement issued through boston.com. “I was issued a citation by the TSA, whose agents couldn’t have been more thorough and professional when dealing with this. I really appreciate their efforts to keep air travel safe.”
Actually, Mr. Russell, no apology is necessary.
The NBA’s greatest defensive player, a man President Barack Obama awarded the Medal of Freedom, should be allowed to defend himself.
In fact, we should apologize to you.
Your right to keep and bear arms is not supposed to be infringed. If you want to carry a handgun onto a plane, it should be your right. But, we have failed to restore American gun rights and we end up dabbling on the meaningless edges—or should I say the “fringes?”
Of course, the Second Amendment, every school boy and girl should know, does not create the right, it acknowledges a right that predates the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
It is a very simple thing, Mr. Russell, but we forgot and ignored it. Instead, we argue over background checks, pistol grips and the definition of semi-automatic. What we should do is demand that we have the gun rights Americans enjoyed before the creation of a federal government bent on obliterating those rights.
What if through some crazy chance, you had made it on the plane, Mr. Russell?
What bad and scarier things, which you so humbly alluded to, would have happened on your flight? Methinks none.
It is worth noting here, that had Russell, or even Larry Bird or anyone else on those cursed planes Sept. 11, 2001 been armed our nation’s history would have been significantly different.
Armed passengers would have stopped those Sept. 11 hijackers, and frankly, just the knowledge that some American passengers are armed would have been enough to scare off the terrorists. Just as armed citizens would have stopped the spree shooting at Newtown, Conn., or any number of shootings, where the shooter arrived expecting a “gun-free zone.”
In the late 1960s, at the height of his powers as a player and coach, Russell supported the Black Panthers and the proposed boycott of the 1968 Olympics by black athletes. When the drafted Muhammad Ali refused to report to the Army, Russell organized other black athletes to support Ali and used his place in popular culture to explain to whites what all the fuss was about.
Many conservatives knock Russell for his radical politics, especially when his NBA rival Wilton N. “Wilt” Chamberlain was supporting Republican candidates, such as Richard M. Nixon. But, it was because he was so, so out there, leading with his chin, that we remember his politics today.
Russell believed in a cause and he worked on the inside and the outside to pursue his vision of racial equality. When Russell saw other black athletes, such as 1936 Olympics hero Jesse Owens, who kept their politics private, he said: “They are do-nothings, who wait until something happens, then say the people involved were wrong.”
In the movement to restore gun rights, there are too many do-nothings. They lurk around and when a spree shooter kills, they bemoan the gun rights movement’s irresponsibility and look for ways to restrict gun rights with background checks, gun bans and those murder traps known as gun-free zones.
Mr. Russell, in a better America, you could board your flight unmolested and your right to defend yourself would be so routine, it would never come up in conversation.
Neil W. McCabe is the editor of Human Event’s “Guns & Patriots” e-letter and was a senior reporter at the Human Events newspaper. McCabe deployed with the Army Reserve to Iraq for 15 months as a combat historian. For many years, he was a reporter and photographer for “The Pilot,” Boston’s Catholic paper. He was also the editor of two free community papers, “The Somerville (Mass.) News and “The Alewife (North Cambridge, Mass.).”
