Three people died in the attack, and the reaction by many was the usual call for more gun control. But Wiley was having none of that illogical argument.
In his video, he declared that “we’ve got to stop blaming the gun and start looking at the humans and the individuals who are now responsible with guns, and unfortunately, like incidents (at Michigan State), irresponsible with those guns.”
The 48-year-old Wiley, who played 10 NFL seasons with four teams, noted that a gun does “nothing” if you place it on a table. It just sits there and “needs a human being to activate. It needs a human being to be that weapon of destruction.”
Wiley tweeted further that the Michigan State tragedy marks the 67th U.S. mass shooting of 2023. It is time to stop the futile blaming of inanimate objects and look to the real source of the problem.
Clearly his message is out of step with many political leaders and the mainstream media, but it is a message that should resonate with law-abiding gun owners. All too often, the anti-gun lobby presents only one solution — to strip away Second Amendment rights from the innocent.
Wiley ripped the argument that schools, streets, and communities will all be magically safer if only all guns are banned. That is a fallacy, he asserted, and the reasons are simple.
“If you ban all the guns only the bad guys are going to get access to guns, because the bad guys are not going to follow the law.” It is a simple but powerful argument that has been made many times, but it bears repeating. Law-abiding Americans have no desire to become felons simply because regulations change, and they are far and away the most likely to step up and obey, even if they vehemently disagree.
Can the same be said for the criminal element? Of course not. By definition, they do not respect the laws of the land and are guaranteed to scoff at rules that say they must give up their weapons.
So, what are we left with? A landscape where violent criminals have free rein and the good guys are at their mercy. Wiley correctly noted this reality and warned that gun bans will do nothing more than suppress the natural right of self-defense.
The NFL great said the correct action is to “take a look within, take a look around, and let’s try to be sensible about this and make sure we are putting the responsibility on the human beings, and not just the object.”
Give Marcellus Wiley credit. He is certainly not the only major sports figure to see the obvious truth, but he is one of the very few with the courage to say what many are undoubtedly thinking. Even as the dust settles on a tragic incident and the investigation is ongoing, too many repeatedly reach the exact same conclusion as always and go directly after constitutional rights.
The right to keep and bear arms is firmly entrenched in the Constitution, and it is not disappearing anytime soon. What the anti-gun lobby wants to do, however, is to chip away at the Second Amendment until it is a meaningless shell of what it was created to be.
Make no mistake, the ultimate goal of enemies of gun rights is the total decimation of the ability to keep and bear arms. Through exploiting tragedies, they will remove the right to self-defense one brick at a time until it no longer exists.
