Guest columnist
Welcome word came late Wednesday afternoon that NBA Commissioner David Stern has suspended Gilbert Arenas from the Washington Wizards for an indefinite period, without pay.
Stern originally thought it prudent to refrain from action pending the criminal investigation of a locker-room dispute involving Arenas, guns and a teammate. But in a statement on the NBA Web site, Sterns said that Arenas' "ongoing conduct has led me to conclude that he is not currently fit to take the court in an NBA game."
No doubt Stern's about-face was prompted by Arenas' behavior -- captured in a photo featured on The Post's Sports front Wednesday -- in which he, thumbs up, index fingers out, pretends to shoot a bunch of his teammates who, in turn, just yukked it up. I found myself disgusted by these grown men -- supposed role models -- making sport of shooting another human being. And I couldn't help wondering how Abe Pollin, who died in November, would have reacted.
So unsettled was Pollin by the carnage of gun violence that in the late 1990s he changed the name of this city's basketball team. He could not in good conscience promote a team called the Bullets, he said, when people -- many of them children -- were losing their lives.
Pollin acted shortly after Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, a longtime friend of his, died as the result of a gun wielded by an assassin. He stood in the spot where Rabin was shot, Pollin told The New York Times. "Bullets connote killing, violence, death. Our slogan used to be, 'Faster than a speeding bullet.' That's no longer appropriate." Pollin knew that while tinkering with tradition might anger fans, principle was more important.
I suspect Pollin would have thought: How dare Arenas flout the law and league regulations by bringing firearms into Verizon Center? How dare he use his young children to try to cover his dangerous behavior? How dare he be so reckless as to use guns to (supposedly) play a joke on a friend? And how dare his teammates just sit back and laugh?
A grand jury is investigating Arenas' actions. I hope it shows him and his teammates that this is no laughing matter. Guns are not status symbols, and violence is never to be tolerated. In other words, Arenas and the Wizards -- indeed, all of us -- should live up to Abe Pollin's example.
The writer is a member of The Washington Post editorial page staff. This was excerpted from The Post's opinion blog.
