Professional Athlete Commits Crime
Former Washington Wizard, recent Charlotte Bobcat, and current former NBA player Lonny Baxter spent last night doing what we're sure so many of you were: randomly firing a pistol out the window of his white SUV blocks away from the White House.
Baxter and a friend fired the shots (allegedly) at an unknown target "about five blocks from the White House" (according to Reuters) and were picked up by the Secret Service by Farragut Square (which, for you non-Washingtonians, is about three blocks from the White House). The uniformed officers saw "in plain view a number of spent shell cartridges" -- though to be fair, our friends never clean out their cars either.
If you're going to pick a Washington neighborhood to fire guns from car windows in, you really couldn't pick a worse one -- a pistol shot fired from, say, Connecticut and Eye St. could, on one of those occasional nights during which gravity exerts no pull over downtown Washington, travel directly to the East Wing. But more importantly,the entire damn neighborhood is policed like a paramilitary state. While we are the first to admit that we enjoy a round of weeknight strip-cruising and gunplay as much as anyone else, it is decidedly the sort of behavior that should be practiced in areas not guarded by an elite force of federally-funded law enforcement agencies with congressional authority to do anything the hell they want to protect the guy who lives across the street (our neighborhood, for example, is much better suited to these sorts of activities -- we don't even have a doorman!).
The Secret Service, commendable though their quick response was, needn't have been so worried. While Baxter's career field goal percentage is a respectable .466, he's only 1 for 5 in three-point attempts.
Basketball Player Arrested After Shots Fired Near White House [AP via USA Today]