What exactly did Ja Morant do wrong? The 23-year-old NBA superstar faced a barrage of criticism after he was seen in an Instagram Live last weekend waving a handgun while bopping to music in a car. This was Morant’s second public escapade with a firearm. He was suspended from his team, the Memphis Grizzlies, in March after a thematically similar video surfaced of Morant in a Denver nightclub.
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said in March that Morant’s behavior was “irresponsible, reckless and potentially dangerous.” Silver was dismayed by last weekend’s video, too, commenting that Morant “could have injured, maimed, killed himself, someone else with an act like that.”
All that’s objectively true, of course. But Morant doesn’t work in a place where such truth has any purchase. He works in Tennessee, where Republican legislators have dismantled so many safety regulations that only the fringiest gun rights — open carry for 18-year-olds is now on the menu — have yet to be enacted.
