Joakim Noah Stops Gun Celebration Following School Shooting

Due to last week’s horrific school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, Chicago Bulls center Joakim Noah is smartly pulling the plug on his gun celebration. Per the Chicago Sun-Times: “Joakim Noah’s post-shot ‘guns of glory’ celebration had been on full display this season, with the Bulls center shooting off finger guns and blowing them off, before emphatically jamming them into imaginary holsters after hitting outside jumpers since the start of camp. But in the wake of the shootings that left 26 people dead at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., last week, Noah made the decision to find a new way to express his improved shooting ability from outside the paint. ‘I started doing it in practice [a few years ago], did the guns and kept doing it,’ Noah explained after the Tuesday 100-89 win over Boston. ‘It was a funny, comical thing, but we’re in a situation right now where it’s not funny. You can’t joke around with things like that. Too many people are dying because of guns. We have a problem here with guns, so I’m trying to be a little compassionate. It’s not a joking matter. We have a serious problem with it in Chicago. It’s crazy. I mean this summer, the movie theater, it’s happening all the time. This is unheard of. Every story is horrific. The gun thing in this country is no joke.’ It was displayed Monday in Memphis, and again against the Celtics on Tuesday, when Noah hit a 21-footer early in the second quarter, and simply clinched his fists, as he back-peddled down the court. […] After the shootings, Noah took to his Twitter account to express his feelings on the horror the country witnessed. Here was his initial tweet: ‘This is so f*cked up … There needs to be some kind of gun control … For real.'”