Baseball doesn't kill people, drunken morons behind the wheels of cars kill people

It's sad but true: nowadays incidents like the drunken road rage that took a life in Nashua over the weekend are all too common. When something's all too common (but not part of a larger trend you can reel in an audience with), if you're in the news business, you need a 'hook' for that kind of story. Sad but true, just the fact that a drunk driver ran down a pedestrian on purpose is not necessarily enough to get the big-time eyeballs.

So for the sake of my sanity, I'm choosing to believe that the news coverage of that incident is focusing perhaps overmuch on the role of the Red Sox - Yankees rivalry in this feud, the better to have a 'hook' on the story.

The story related in this newscast says that the two antagonists fought as they were leaving separate bars. It seems the fight took place as they ran into each other on the street, and the driver of the car who later ran down the other one(within a group of pedestrians) is known to have been intoxicated. Then, the newscast points out, the one with a Yankees sticker on her car ran down the one who was a Red Sox fan, and the two are said to have bickered about their respective teams, among other things, prior to the incident.

Having left a bar late and possibly overserved on more than one occasion myself (sorry, Mom), it's not hard to imagine virtually any source of conflict generating a ridiculous, overblown brawl or 'incident' among irresponsible and (at least in the case of one party for sure) clearly idiotic people.

In other words, if it hadn't been that, it might've been something else. A T-shirt. The classic "looking at me funny". A disparaging comment about appearance. Anybody, no matter how drunk they are, willing and able to run down someone in their car isn't best defined as a fan of a Major League baseball team. Rather, they're best defined as your general "moron and / or psychopath." What baseball team sticker she had on the back of the car she used as a murder weapon is not relevant, in my opinion.

But we also have a tendency to do this in this country, beyond the vagaries and scruples of the 24-hour news cycle. We blame Nintendo when two kids manage to stockpile a huge arsenal of weapons and explosives right under the noses of their parents and then shoot up their school. We blame Marilyn Manson. We blame that rock and roll music.

If you ask me, bringing baseball into this story is just another way of missing the same point.

P.S. Toldja.

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