Mon May 05, 2008 2:05 pm EDT
Someone
in Philadelphia robbed a bank and killed a cop, so the Philadelphia police are
rightfully focusing their efforts there, instead of trying to figure something
out in the weird case where someone was shot with a Belgian gun that may or may
not belong to Marvin Harrison.
So there are no new developments in the case, and there probably won't be anytime soon. Harrison still isn't a suspect, and his agent says he's not under investigation.
But I wasn't around last week when the story broke, so let's get into it now. The first thought I had, like everyone else, was "Marvin Harrison? Quiet, productive, non-controversial Marvin Harrison? Why, I just can't believe it."
But the more I thought about it, the more I wondered how much we really know about Marvin Harrison. He is, at least publicly, a very quiet and introverted man. And in the NFL, it's the loud receivers, guys like Terrell Owens, Chad Johnson, and Randy Moss, who are seen as the bad guys. So if Harrison was the opposite of that, he had to be the good guy, right?
Maybe not. Maybe all this time, we were mistaking "quiet" for "well-behaved."
The fact is, we don't know anything about Marvin Harrison (and probably know a lot less about pro athletes in general than we'd like to think), because that's how he's always preferred things. He doesn't share his personal life with the media or with the public, and that's his right.
But regardless of guilt or innocence in this particular case, I learned things about Harrison that I didn't know. I didn't know he owned 25 guns. I wouldn't have guessed that about him. I didn't know that one of those guns was a custom-made Belgian job that shoots .50 caliber bullets, which will come in handy if you ever need to drop a rampaging brontosaurus on PCP with one shot. Why anyone owns one of those things, I have no idea.
I guess the point is that I can be guilty of rushing to judgment on people in both directions. A guy does one thing that's unseemly or out-of-line with how I think people should behave, and he gets painted as a lowlife bastard who isn't fit to share an unpleasant and nonconsensual shower encounter with Rae Carruth.
On the other side of the coin, a guy does absolutely nothing except remain quiet and store a pint of milk in his mustache, and he gets painted as a saint.
Neither is a good idea.
Now, I'm not saying that we've learned in all this that Marvin Harrison's an evil man and that he's had us fooled all along. At this point, he's been charged with and accused of nothing. The point is, that when it comes to Marvin Harrison's character, we just don't know. It's possible that for all these years, I've been mistaking quiet for class.
Shutdown Corner is an NFL blog edited by Matthew J. Darnell. Email him, and follow him on Twitter.

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As for the caliber of the "special gun", the writer here obviously doesn't know squat about guns. A .50 probably would dent the hide of a brontosaurus, but probably not a whole lot more. I may not know a whole lot more than him, but I do know enough to know that shotguns firing slugs of approximately a half-inch diameter are used in deer hunting. But surely there is only a very slight difference in size and toughness between a brontosaurus and a deer.
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