UPDATE: Aldon Smith was activated by the 49ers from the Non-Football Injury list
Aldon Smith has returned to team headquarters today. Whether he can play soon or even at all remains to be seen. He has his Nov 12 appearance for the 3 weapons charges he faces, as well as a Nov 19 court date for the DUI arrest that put him into rehab in the first place. Tell ya one thing. That must have been one hell of a party. He got stabbed, weapons were fired, and Smith ends up getting arrested for assault weapons charges.
Not sure how the fact that the cops invited Smith to go to a shooting range plays into this, but it can’t help the prosecution’s case very much. I’m sure that the weapons charges will get pled down to misdemeanors, but the DUI thing still has to be dealt with. Although the ‘good faith’ deal of Smith going to rehab and thus missing 5 games also plays into the league’s reaction. I suppose the next couple weeks of his being with the team and how he addresses these things in public will play their role as well. Act contrite and talk about changing your life, and that works with Goodie Goodell’s perception-is-everything idea of cleaning up his league. Act like a stupid punk going forwardand pay the price. I don’t think he, or the team, is that dense though. He will likely be in lockdown mode as the team has assured him that one more wrong move and he’ll be tossed from the team. if not the league.
That’s all well and good. I sincerely hope he gets his shit together and stays with the team, as he is a once-in-a-generation talent, and seems to be a nice kid, if not caught up in a bunch of shit. The party seemed to bring some nasty shit to the forefront for him, but the DUI stuff has dogged him for a while now. Is it simply the exuberance of youth? Too much too soon for a young man? A thug escaping the hood? Truth be told no one knows but Aldon and his family. When he was drafted, I didn’t hear anything regarding red flags or behavior issues around him, but then again, I hadn’t heard of him at all until the Niners drafted him.
The unspoken elephant in the room regarding him (and a few other mercurial talents that get in trouble) is that HE doesn’t really have to do much to get right back into the league with an enormous contract under his belt, provided he doesn’t kill himself or someone else. Whether he is suspended for all of this year and next, cut from the Niners and even does some jail time, teams will line up to sign him after he has faced his obligations, whatever they may be. The league is filled with guys who have faced many differing charges and have come back. Pacman Jones being the most glaring example. He was on probation when drafted for a bar fight, and arrested for vandalizing a nightclub in Nashville before ever playing a down in the NFL. Then there was the public drunkenness arrest, and the infamous ‘making it rain’ beating of a stripper and subsequent gunplay. He served time, was suspended for a year, and generally kept screwing up for years. Even after the shooting incident, he was involved in other shootings and general unruliness. He’s currently playing very well for the Bengals on a 3 year deal.
The point? Well, Aldon still holds all the chips in his future. If he gets his shit together, he can reap tons of money and gain possible HOF status if he keeps rolling the way he has played. Keep screwing up and he still will likely play for a lot of money, if not go through the machinations of jail, suspensions, fines, and other bullshit. Like I said, I hope he straightens himself out before he kills himself or someone else, or simply pisses his career away.
Forty Niners Forever 
Well, that certainly is a start. Making sure guys like the ex-military guy who had access to anything he wanted (and had a loooong paper trail of mental instability) gets checked out before being allowed to buy weapons would help. Sure, just about anyone can get a gun. But there are enough people legally buying guns who have an established history of mental illness that could have been stopped with cursory checks to their background.
12th, you open this by saying gun deaths are down 39% and then say the CA laws are ineffective. Those two statements may not be mutually exclusive. Other states have put forth similar measures. Who’s to say those aren’t working?
Gun deaths in CA have not fallen by more than the national average, ergo the laws are statistically not working. Further evidence of draconian control laws not working, Chicago, Washington DC etc,. The laws they chose to enact to reduce gun deaths simply have not worked.
The rest of America that did nothing to reduce gun ownership have statistically the same reduction of deaths.
Maybe more liberal carry laws works?
If that was true, then gun violence and gun deaths in AZ would be down. They are up. They are over the national average in both categories. States like Louisiana, AZ, and Alabama have weak gun laws and much higher levels of gun violence.
To what do you attribute the drop in CA gun violence? Or the drop across the nation? Certainly states that have relaxed gun carry laws aren’t seeing benefits.
I think we can agree, there are lies, damned lies and statistics so we each can use these to bolster an argument.
If less guns is the driving factor for why gun deaths occur then DC should have negligible gun death. It has the lowest rate of legal gun ownership in the US at 3.6% yet the highest rate of gun deaths at 21.8 per 100,000 people. It is the only place in America that even has double digit rates per 100,000.
For comparison wyoming has the highest rate of legal gun ownership at 59.7% with gun deaths at 1.4 per 100,000
Legal gun ownership is clearly not the driver of gun death.
Arizona 31.1/3.6 gun ownership/gun death per capita
Alabama 51.7/2.8
DC 3.6/16.5 (corrected)
Louisiana 44.1/7.7
NY 18%/2.8
NJ 12.3/2.7
Wyoming 59.7/.09 (corrected)
Lots of legal guns = less gun death per capita
This is a simplistic argument I’m making as many factors are necessary to conclude why some places have higher gun death rates, the biggest of which is large metropolitan areas with the highest illegal gun owership rates (gangs).
The truth is that the only answer to a bad man with a gun is a good guy with a gun (cops for instance) or everybody dies. The bigger truth is the authorities don’t want the general public to be on an equal footing in terms of self defense as it threatens their control and that is really why the push is for evermore restrictive laws that statistically do nothing to lower gun death as legal gun ownership is not generally the cause of gun death except in these extraodinary mental illness cases.
If laws are needed then I believe the mentally ill and those they live with are to be targeted not an “all of the above” approach that removes all citizens rights and effectively gives even more power to our power crazed governments. The NSA is the tip of the iceberg. Don’t be too eager to keep giving rights away, especially on a false premise, as rights you may hold dear may be next.
The point being, doing nothing should not be an option. We know what is happening now and there are too many unstable people with weapons.
There’s a new thread up, BTW.
LMFAO! Too many drunks, convicted DUIers and unstable wackos driving deadly weapons. Not much outcry there. Nobody talking about outlawing motor vehicles.
Unstable wackos don’t worry too much about their weapons being of the legal and approved type.
Most anti-gunners want nothing less than confiscation and a total ban on guns. Except for their body guards and pro athletes I guess.
Aldon Smith personifies all they object to yet no one is hoping he’s subjected to the penalties of the laws already on the books. Funny as hell, isn’t it?
By the way, one can’t get more gun-rights restrictive than prison. Somehow, they seem to find a way to create weapons there. To quote my old buddy, Hognose, “If a comb in the wrong hands is a weapon, maybe the problem is not the comb.”
(Commenting on the news article:)
MyFoxDetroit.com reported that Pearson escaped from a holding cell at the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice after stabbing 63-year-old sherriff’s deputy Harrison Tolliver three times in the neck with an improvised knife. Pearson then took the deputy’s uniform, cell phone, and radio and escaped out the back door before carjacking a van. The vehicle was found abandoned blocks away from the courthouse on Detroit’s east side.
The improvised knife was a sharpened comb, a staple of convict armament.
Interesting chat on a slow football day, thanks guys.
Gee, NoFear. Do you need to register to get a drivers license? Are there background checks for mental stability for that? Medical history? Uh, yeah. So what’s your point again? Do multiple DUI offenders go to jail? Well, unless you are a celeb/politician/athlete, yes.
As usual you paint any kind of change as ‘they want to take our freedom!’ Beyond the fact that the constitution allows for a well-armed militia, not personal gun ownership.