Chalk up a victory for the non-woke crowd. Pouty John Feinstein boycotted this year’s Final Four because host state Texas has refused to grab people’s guns. For those unfamiliar with the Duke University graduate Feinstein, he had been a leading author and personality on college basketball for years. Now he’s just a foolish man who believes guns are more evil than the person using them to shoot people.
Feinstein wrote in The Washington Post exactly why he refused to travel to Houston for the Final Four and why he won’t attend next year’s event in Arizona, where anti-gun laws are also “sorely lacking.”:
I’m not going for one simple reason: On June 2, nine days after 19 schoolchildren and two teachers were shot and killed at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Tex., I wrote a column urging the NCAA to move this year’s Final Fours out of Texas — the women’s event is in Dallas — until and unless that state passed something resembling meaningful gun legislation.
We need to know how much it hurts Feinstein to have boycotted the 2023 Final Four, why? Because it would have been the 40th Final Four he attended. Because his pal Jim Larranaga coaches the Miami Hurricanes. Because Florida Atlantic is coached by a former Bobby Knight manager. It’s his kind of Final Four.
Great! Let him keep his anti-Second Amendment thoughts out of the states respecting the right of human beings to protect themselves from violent criminals.
Not satisfied with running Arizona and Texas through the mud, Feinstein erroneously claimed that the transgender who shot and killed six people at a Christian school in Nashville last week did the dastardly deed with an “AR-15 style rifle.”
Wrong. As Breitbart’s Second Amendment writer AWR Hawkins pointed out, Audrey Hale killed the victims with a carbine and did not even bring an AR-15 rifle to the school. (In fairness, it was black and scary looking -- close enough for Feinstein to wet himself over.)
Feinstein erred again by saying “only 21 states require a background check or a permit to purchase a handgun.” Federal law requires a background check for every handgun purchase. Background checks are facilitated through the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, through the FBI.
Feinstein's been sniping away about removing collegiate basketball championships from Texas since last June. The NCAA went ahead with the women’s championship event in Dallas this past weekend. The men’s Final Four wraps up in Houston tonight.
“I knew two things for certain when I wrote the column,” Feinstein says. “Texas wasn’t going to change its gun laws, and the NCAA was going to hide under a rock and do nothing. Sometimes you have to tilt at windmills.”
Based on his lack of expertise on guns and gun laws, as Hawkins demonstrated, Feinstein appears to be somewhat of a Don Quixote himself. And no one should listen to his foolishness about disarming peaceful Americans. There have been too many journalists mouthing off about canceling states that don’t support woke politics, most notably those who demanded baseball’s 2021 all-star game be removed from Georgia. Bravo to the NCAA for realizing that bigtime sports should not attempt to interfere with state lawmaking.
