Plaxico madness!

I saw Mike Lupica almost have a seizure on "The Sports Reporters" over the weekend talking about the Plaxico-shooting-himself fiasco, and I kept my eyes peeled for a corresponding angry and uber-judgmental column. Voila!

Either the Giants have to tell Plaxico Burress he doesn't just get to come back to work as if nothing happened, or NFL commissioner Roger Goodell has to tell Burress that.

[Easy, Lupica. The league (and undoubtedly the teams therein) have player conduct rules that govern these kinds of situations. I'm pretty sure both the Giants and Goodell might glance at them with respect to Plaxico. In other news, I will be seriously impressed if you can write the rest of this column from up on your cross.]

Burress hasn't earned the right to be exempt, from anything. He thought he needed a gun to "protect" himself.

[Air quotes? Really?? Look, maybe Lupica is making a correct assumption that Plaxico carries around a gun to amass street cred. Or maybe Plaxico carries a gun because he doesn't want to get murdered like Sean Taylor did. The point is that I have no idea why Plax carries a gun! And I'm willing to assume that Lupica has no idea either. We do, in our society, have a reasonably effective way of determining such things; it's called the legal system! The angry judgment of sportswriters works too, though.]

In the end, Burress didn't even know how to work the safety, and nobody is talking about a free safety here.

[Totally appropriate time for a pun. Stay classy, Lupica!]

When was the last time you heard of somebody like Plaxico Burress being a crimefighter?

[Isn't the argument of famous people in these situations that they carry a gun to PREVENT a crime? I'm pretty sure there are "No vigilante crime-fighting" clauses in most professional sports contracts nowadays, anyway.]

More often than not, they become the crime.

[Kind of why they claim to carry the gun, right?]

Just knowing what we know now, you wonder how even a smart lawyer like Brafman, who has known his share of actual bad guys, can plead out on this one, at least in Bloomberg's New York anyway.

[Exactly. Why even permit Plaxico the opportunity to present a defense?! Or, hell, a trial even!? Just ship him straight to Gitmo before Obama shuts it down. (listening to the "America, F*ck yeah!" song from Team America on full blast)]

What happened with Burress happened in the real world. And in the real world, there are consequences when you act like this much of a dope. One is this: Your boss is the one who decides if you get your old desk back.

[Right. So why did YOU just spend several hundred words deciding? Who needs to look at acutal laws or league rules that will govern a situation when Mike Lupica's narrowly-focused rage will suffice?!]