USA TODAY: …Jones bought his first gun his senior year at the University of Virginia, and, as a rookie with the Arizona Cardinals a dozen years ago, he learned quickly that guns were an ingrained part of the NFL culture.
“Most guys when they first come into the league is when they first start to realize they need protection,” Jones says. “Because money brings a lot of positive things. But most of the time, it brings more negative things. People don’t like you for what you have, for who you are. They don’t like you for what you represent. And people will go to any length to take what you have or harm you in some way just because they don’t have what you have. If you don’t have a firearm to protect you from situations and God forbid something happens to you, you wish you would have a firearm.”
Jones, who retired last season with the Kansas City Chiefs after 12 years in the league, was a big brother to young linebacker Jovan Belcher, who killed his girlfriend, and then himself, last Saturday… (more)
EDITOR: There are many people, at least as exposed to danger and hardly as able to defend themselves as NFL football players, who choose not to keep hand guns in their homes for fear of an accident or impulse of the moment.
At the age of perhaps six, thinking that the gun on my father’s bureau was another toy cap pistol, I aimed it at my mother and pulled the trigger. Fortunately, the safety was on. At another time, my father came close to shooting our cousin who was staying with us, thinking he was an intruder.
Statistics suggest that such mishaps are a far greater danger than being harmed by an intruder.
While living in the country, we did keep a shot gun, kept high up in our bedroom closet and with the shells stored elsewhere. I shot a potentially rabid skunk straying in broad daylight close to children at a birthday party. (I soon learned the hardway that if you shoot a skunk, bury it quick!)
