NBA legend Malone offers thoughts on alleged Wizards gun incident

[NJNJ]

Former NBA star Karl Malone is an avid hunter who publicly declared his advocacy of the right to bear arms by becoming a spokesman for the National Rifle Association. SI.com asked Malone for his thoughts on the situation involving three-time All-Star Gilbert Arenas, who acknowledged Monday that he stored unloaded guns at the Verizon Center in Washington, D.C., and said he displayed them in front of Wizards teammate as "a misguided effort to play a joke."

 

The report that Arenas and teammate Javaris Crittenton had allegedly pulled guns on each other was one of the worst things I've ever seen come across the TV. All the years I played, I've never heard of anything like this alleged incident or of a player bringing guns into the locker room. Doing that in the locker room, with so much that can happen? It's one of those things you just don't do. I can't make any sense of that. You can't tell me one good thing that can happen with a gun in an arena, but I can tell you a thousand bad things.

 

If I'm a player on that team, of course, I'm saying to those guys, "What the hell are you doing?" Even if, as Arenas insists, he brought the guns to the arena because he wanted them away from his children at home, I wouldn't have bought that excuse. Buy a safe. Put them in there. End of story.

 

The NBA can't sweep something like that under the rug. To me, this is another example of a dark cloud that we can never seem to get over. When I say "we," I mean the NBA. I'm still an NBA player; I'm just retired. The amazing thing to me is, it seems just when the league has a little bit of positivity, then we have one big negative and it reflects on all the players. Now people think every NBA player is carrying firearms into the locker room. I guess the next thing is that instead of us walking around those metal detectors in arenas, we should start walking through them. So many kids are doing it the right way in the league, but you get linked with one guy making one mistake.

 

This is bigger than a guns-in-the-locker-room story, because supposedly the alleged altercation stemmed from a gambling debt. I used to play cards with teammates, and you're not just playing for the sake of it. You're playing for money, but I never won or lost to the point I was angry with my teammates and wanted to fight or pull a gun.

 

With regard to discipline, commissioner David Stern is the only one who can attempt to fix this, and he has to be the one to make the statement -- in the same way that Roger Goodell treats disciplinary situations with the NFL. I absolutely love the way Goodell handles things. I know people don't really like what Goodell has done in certain cases, but they respect him because he'll tell you why he did it. I don't want to seem like I'm bashing Stern, because I'm not, but that's what people want to see.

 

Read more: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2010/basketball/nba/01/05/karl.malone.arenas/index.html#ixzz0brRH3iPQ