I admit it. Some of you are going to mock me for this, but it’s the truth:
I’ve always been much more of a soccer fan than an American football fan.
Blame it on the fact that I was a skinny kid and that I grew up in an Air Force town. Or blame it on the fact that I always got bored watching football stop after each play and set up for the next, so I prefer the constant movement and action of soccer.
It is what it is.
But even if you hate soccer (which, if you think about it, really should be the sport called football instead of American football being called that here), I think that you’ll admit that some people’s sense of showing hospitality to teams from other countries is going about it all wrong. A Reuters article gives us the details:
Nine people sustained non-life-threatening injuries in a shooting near ​England’s World Cup base camp ‌in Kansas City, Missouri, on Saturday, days before the tournament is due ​to kick off.
Now, I’m all for gun ownership here in the U.S., but if we’re going to spread our passion for the Second Amendment to folks from other countries, a better way to do it would be to take them out to the range.
Of course, I’m being sarcastic about that. This news story shouldn’t have even come up because it shouldn’t have ever happened.
But the people who are committing crimes like these aren’t thinking about how it makes American culture look to other countries. They aren’t thinking about whether their parents would be upset with them for shooting at people.
In fact, I’d bet a good chunk of change that they aren’t thinking about anything beyond their anger and their desire to get revenge or to dominate someone else.
They have no comprehension at all of what Tim Larkin calls “the three day rule.”
The three day rule is the idea that you know what situations are worth you pulling a firearm and, consequently, doing jail time (or even dying) because you did that. There aren’t many things that are worth that.
It’s time that we started teaching our kids (and other people’s kids, too) to think ahead about that.
We should also be teaching them that the more manly thing is to swallow your pride in the face of an insult so that you can continue to care for and protect your family. After all, any fool can ignore this advice, can ignore the three day rule, and we end up with another kid without a parent or another child gone because they couldn’t swallow their pride in order to live another day.
We want those situations to stop, and helping them to learn this perspective is a big part of that process.
