Gilbert Arenas Arrested: At Least He Didn’t Murder Anyone
He looks relatively pleased with himself, doesn’t he?
During his career in the league, former NBA player Gilbert Arenas was known for underachieving on the court and overachieving at getting himself into trouble. If he hadn’t played predominately for the lowly Washington Wizards, who knows if his career would have lasted as long as it did.
Granted, Arenas was known more as a locker room cancer and perennial malcontent, than as a danger to society. His most infamous incident took place in the Wizards locker room on Christmas Eve 2009. Arenas and former teammate Javaris Crittenton drew guns on each other in a dispute over gambling debts.
According to reports, it was Arenas who was the initial aggressor, with Crittenton only pulling his gun in response to having a gun pulled on him. Each of the players produced firearms like a couple of Washington Wizards, but thankfully no Washington Bullets were fired.
In the wake of the ugly incident, it was actually Arenas who took the brunt of the bad press—he did pull his gun first, after all. And he had been, apparently, stockpiling weapons in his locker because he wanted to get them out of his home after his daughter was born.
Hey, that was his story and he was sticking to it.
Gilbert sad.
Arenas’ career in the NBA went downhill fast after the locker room incident and in November 2012 he was signed by the Chinese Basketball Association team, the Shanghai Sharks. Can’t speak knowledgeably on their calendar or his success there but Arenas is back in the states just in time for the 4th of July.
Which, obviously means, that it was only a matter of time before he was arrested for driving around Los Angeles with 20 boxes of illegal fireworks in the bed of his truck—approximately 100 pounds of sweet, exploding awesomeness.
Seriously, what else would he be doing?
Arenas was spotted by California Highway Patrol around 2:30 am driving approximately 80 mph in his Ford pickup. Not only was he speeding with a truck full of explosives, he was also driving without a license.
Gossip hounds TMZ just happened to be on hand to capture the entire arrest on video. (And for that we thank them!) According to their report, the LAPD bomb squad was called in to deal with the vast quantity of fireworks.
All of that being said, I’m going to go ahead and defend Arenas a little bit here, freely admitting that he’s benefitting from the recent headlines about New England Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez and South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius.
Hernandez is actually linked to THREE homicides at the moment.
Hernandez was recently charged with the first degree, execution style, murder of a friend and Olympic hero Pistorius made headlines around the glove when he was charged with murdering his girlfriend, stunning model Reeva Steenkamp, at his home in early 2013.
Oh, and then there’s his former teammate Javaris Crittenton, the teammate who found himself face-to-face with the business end of Arenas’ gun back in their locker room back in 2009! He may not have been the aggressor in that incident, but in April 2013 he was inducted on 12 charges in Atlanta.
They ranged from counts stemming from his involvement in gang activity to attempted murder to a successfully carried out murder. Crittenton will be tried for the murder of a mother of two who was shot and killed in Atlanta in 2011. Police say the motive may have been retaliation for a robbery in which Crittenton has upwards of $50,000 worth of jewelry stolen.
Wonder if the dead woman gave him back his diamonds?
Someone needs to inform NBA players that murder isn’t a proportional response to having jewelry stolen from them. It seems like a relatively obvious conclusion, but there seems to be some haziness on the issue with some of their players.
Keeping all that in mind, Arenas’ fireworks flub certainly doesn’t seem like that big of a deal. He’s a man who likes fireworks, speeding, and driving without a license—what’s the big deal?There are a lot worse things in this world.
Like murdering people.
So, kudos to Gilbert Arenas for not murdering anyone. At least not yet. We’re all very proud of you. Keep up the good work.
