I hate to sound judgmental, but I am

Tam wrote a smart piece on what it takes to avoid 99.99% of self-defense situations without having to learn to shoot or strike or grapple or duel with bowie knives. At the same time, elements of the national media, including sportswriters like Mike Lupica at Sports Illustrated and Neil Katz at CBS News, are alternately wailing about the gun culture and cowering behind crucifixes chanting "It . . . is . . . alive!" at a Jennings 9mm pistol because it (and not the woman who decided to point it at him and pull the trigger) murdered a famous football player. Sharp as a Marble had excerpts from Katz's voodoo fetish story today, and they show that Katz is extremely worried that the jumbi in the pistol might jump up and kill someone else next:

At any one of those turns, had something happened differently, McNair might still be alive. No one can know.

Actually, that's not true. The twist that matters is the one when Sahel Kazemi made the decision to kill Steve McNair. The others are just details that could have changed a million different ways, but as long as Sahel Kazemi still decided that Steve McNair had to die, she could have done it with anything from a frying pan to a kitchen knife to a can of gasoline and a match.

Federal authorities haven’t said when the gun was born, but they know who made it - a now defunct California firm called Bryco, and later renamed Jennings,

Uh . . . OK. I've heard of biological weapons, but this is ridiculous. And you're ridiculous, Mr. Katz.

The gun was a 9mm and by 2002 it had made its way into a Tenn. pawn shop, where it likely sat under locked glass, flickering fluorescent bulbs shining off its metal skin.

Uh . . . . huh. Hm. One wonders if this is why the gun made the decision to become a murder weapon rather than, for instance, going out and finding some poor single mother and living on her nightstand just in case. But then, who knows why guns do what they do? You buy them books and send them to school, but they never call, and they never write.
But they do have skin, and it's made of metal, I guess, and that's creepier than John McCain trying to smile at a baby.

When police arrived her body had already fallen to the floor. The gun lay beneath her crumpled body in a pool of the killer’s own blood.

Police located it by following the sound of the gun's maniacal laughter and its mad cackling: "They called me MAD at the foundry! Now the serial number a001337 will be remembered forever! Remembered . . . . and feared! Mwa ha ha ha ha!"

Remember kids, if you see a firearm, draw a circle of salt around it and sprinkle it with garlic to trap the jumbi inside. Then if you want you can go find an adult or whatever.

But seriously, this brings me to my real point, which I fear may be taken as prudish and judgmental. One of the ways to, as Tamara puts it, not get killed, is to avoid doing things like taking on a 20-year-old mistress who thinks you're going to leave your wife. Maybe things are different in France or wherever the "enlightened" culture teaches that all successful men must have mistresses, because maybe women there understand what "mistress" means and what the limits of that role really are. But here, in America, you hook up with a barely-adult waitress who isn't your wife at your own peril. It's always possible that she doesn't accept sugar-daddy relationships with older, married millionaire celebrities because of her rock-solid personal stability and rationality.

Just saying. I love Steve McNair as much as the next person who never knew him but enjoys watching football on the tv sets, but the guy made a really, really bad choice and he got killed. I've made some dumb choices in my life, most of them involving explosives and/or automobiles, that could have killed me. I'm very lucky that they didn't. But if they had, most people wouldn't have pretended the car I died in was a person with a murderous soul. But then again, I never played in a Super Bowl.