Guns, hockey, and ass-whippin'

Sidney Crosby, known as "Sid the Kid" was a rising star player for the NHL's Pittsburgh Penguins. In his first season in the NHL, he was the sixth most productive scorer in the league. In his second, he was the number one most productive scorer. His future was bright. Until the fifth season, when he took blows to the head twice within a four day period. He began showing unspecified "concussion-like symptoms," missed the rest of that season, the playoffs, and the first quarter of the following season. All from taking two blows to the head while wearing a helmet. Sid eventually recovered and is playing again, but remember that that head injury took nearly a year to recover from.

How is this related to guns? Dr. Hemenway of the Harvard School of Public Health claimed on January 13 that:

The gun is a great equalizer because it makes wimps as dangerous as people who really have skill and bravery and so I’d like to have this notion that anyone using a gun is a wuss. They aren’t anybody to be looked up to. They’re somebody to look down at because they couldn’t defend themselves or couldn’t protect others without using a gun.

Now some of you may see where I am going with this, and others will think that I am advocating that hockey players should shoot opposing players with handguns.

The reason I bring up Sidney Crosby is simple: There is this attitude in the United States that when a person attacks you, you should try to engage in some sort of boxing match, and if you are unable to adequately defend yourself from a larger, faster, or more skilled opponent, you should "take your ass whipping like a man." This comes mainly from the Hollywood fallacy that people can take a hit to the head that is sufficient to knock them unconscious and wake up with nothing worse to show for it than a headache. The fact is: ANY blow to the head is potentially fatal, as this article describes.  

The fact is that fists and feet are the murder weapons in over 700 murders a year. In fact, in 2011, an 11 year old girl killed a classmate with her bare hands. Taking away the ability for that homosexual to defend himself from the teens that want to beat him up, the woman who is the intended victim of a rapist, the senior citizen from the violent Burger King employee, or the man in a wheelchair from his attacker doesn't make us manlier, it makes us more of a "survival of the fittest" Darwinian society and society fails. For isn't the point of society to protect those who are unable to protect themselves?