Here are three quotes from Puck Daddy’s “oh my God, did you seriously put NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman’s picture on the targets at your firing range” interview with DVC Indoor Shooting Center manager Wes Yen that put the story in its proper context:

“It seems to be one of our more popular targets. It’s actually been a pretty big hit for us.”

“I guess not. It’s an animated target. We’re not using real people. Everyone knows it’s just for fun.”

“It’s good for my business. When there’s nothing on TV, people will come down to the range and start shooting.”

Here’s what I’ve pieced together: Everyone who comes to the firing range has a well-meaning understanding that this is all for fun, but are also the types to START SHOOTING GUNS AT THINGS BECAUSE HOCKEY IS NOT ON TELEVISION. Remind me to wear a blaze orange morphsuit the next time I’m in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, in the summer.

A better look at the target is below. Note that while the targets aren’t specifically on Bettman, three of the four are clear and Gary’s full of bullet holes. This is all for fun, hooray!

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Previous ‘Sports On TV’ columns (for ‘Saved By The Bell’ and ‘Full House’) have been fun to write but a pain to suffer through for research, because seriously, have you tried watching an 8th season episode of ‘Full House’ in 2012? Those columns sorta celebrate the badness of sports on TV, and how they get shoehorned in when people run out of love triangles and job jokes don’t have anything to write about.

So it’s with great pride that I present the third ‘Sports On TV’ effort, celebrating the 25 best sports moments from one of the best and most under-appreciated animated comedies ever made, FOX’s ‘King Of The Hill’. If you haven’t seen it before or just flip past it when you’re looking for ‘Squidbillies’ episodes on Adult Swim, the show’s entire 13-season run is available on Netflix streaming and is one of the best ways to spend 130-ish hours. What made the sports on ‘King Of The Hill’ great is that they aren’t accessories to the action … they’re focal points, important or not, just like in real life.

I’m lucky to have some great guest columnists this week, so I hope you enjoy the list. And yeah, there are at least 40 other moments we could’ve included here, so consider this part 1 of an eventual 50 Greatest Sports Moments Of ‘King Of The Hill’. We’ll loop back around when I realize Golden Girls didn’t have 20 sports moments on it.

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Saturday’s preseason NFL game between the San Francisco 49ers and the Oakland Raiders involved fights in the stands, two parking lot shootings and a beaten and unconscious in a Candlestick Park bathroom. Philly sports fans took the opportunity to say “YOU GUYS ALWAYS TALK ABOUT PHILLY FANS BUT DERP” and everyone else approached it from a place somewhere between disappointment and disbelief. The beating of Bryan Stow outside Dodger Stadium on baseball’s Opening Day has cast a national spotlight on irrational fan behavior, with the question always boiling down to, “How does this kind of thing happen?”

49ers owner Jed York has decided to become the Biggest Dick You’ll Read About Today by answering that question — he believes there is not enough football, and is willing to use fan shootings as an excuse to push for a longer season. From a horrible interview with KNBR by way of the Sacramento Bee and Pro Football Talk:

“I think when you have a preseason game, when you don’t have your regular-season ticket holders coming to a game, I think that plays a big factor into it,” York said. “I think that’s another reason why the NFL is looking at, you know, trying to revamp the preseason schedule.”

PFT explains why this is horrid in the simplest terms.

The violence at Candlestick Park on Saturday is a time to have serious conversations across the league about how to keep fans safe, not a time to make specious arguments in favor of an 18-game season.

…leaving everyone else free to ask, “How f**king disconnected are you from real life that you think ‘letting poorer people attend the football games’ is the reason why people are shooting each other and beating each other to death in your parking lot?” Extending the season to limit the amount of people without season tickets in your stands is specious, sure, but it’s also a huge statement on class difference, the condescending attitude of owners claiming to be part of a system and only looking out for themselves, and just the biggest pile of sh*t-smelling ignorance ever.

So in meaner terms, do what Pro Football Talk suggested. Really think about how to protect and take care of these people, and don’t wait a tossed battery, a Mountain Dew bottle full of Big Dawg’s acid piss or a fan dying from gunshot wounds to show up and justify your agenda.

[h/t Jimmy Traina]

What should have been a celebration between two teams with the worst quarterbacks in the NFL turned into a day of utter embarrassment to the league, the teams, and sports fans in general. On Saturday, the San Francisco 49ers defeated the Oakland Raiders 17-3, thanks to two running backs that we’ve never heard of and some field goals. Both Alex Smith and Jason Campbell were as underwhelming as we’ve grown to know them, and their backups were also terribly unimpressive. Thankfully, nobody in the stands noticed, because they were busy beating the crap out of each other.

According to the San Francisco Chronicle, there were multiple assaults reported at the game, including but not limited to:

• A man wearing a “F*ck the 49ers” shirt was shot “two to four times” in the stomach in the parking lot and was only discovered after he fell out of his truck as he tried to drive away. San Francisco police have a suspect in custody, and it was reported that he was wearing a Raiders shirt. That means that Raiders fans were attacking Raiders fans, either over something unrelated or, quite possibly, through a misinterpretation of apparel.
• Another man was found shot in a parking lot after the game, and he also had some wounds on his face. It wasn’t reported if he was wearing any specific team apparel and it shouldn’t matter.
• A 26-year old man was found beaten and unconscious in a Candlestick Park bathroom, with “life-threatening injuries.”

After the jump, we have a video of another fight in the stands, including fans of both teams fighting each other.

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I’ll leave the puns to you guys, but I couldn’t finish the week without showing you this video of a guy firing a semi-automatic pistol, and then reloading it. Sure, he’s no Quick Draw McGraw, but that’s still awesome. He probably has a poster of Sarah Palin hanging up in his garage next to his Vaseline and Dyson vacuum cleaner. I still want to give this guy a hug, even though he can’t hug back.

Enjoy the video after the jump.

I just got home from a 5-day trip to the Bahamas, not like any of you jerks cared, but the first thing I checked was Florida news, and hot damn, I was not disappointed. A man in Niceville, FL, hosted a little NFL party for 5 of his closest friends on Sunday, and his house party made House Party 2 look like House Party 16. Turns out them fellas got a little liquid courage and subsequently rowdy. After complaints from neighbors, the host of the party asked his friends to take a chill pill. They responded by beating the piss out of him. He responded by getting his gun and shooting into the air. The whole world responded by saying, “For the love of God, Florida.”

Hey, Northwest Florida News, teach us about sentence fragments:

The men had consumed a lot of alcohol and began getting boisterous, the man told officers. When the man told his guests to quiet down. Then, when he asked them to leave because they were causing a disturbance, the men attacked him.

The man only fired into the air, but he still managed to hit more targets than David Garrard.

Now, for a little background on the quiet Hamlet that is Niceville, I’m going to take you all in a time machine back to 2000 at THE University of Central Florida, where I majored in getting f*cktarded. There were six guys in my fraternity from Niceville and they were probably the craziest guys I’ve ever met. One guy was so lazy that he refused to walk from his room to the bathroom, so he peed in bottles and just left them around his room. Even better, he pissed into apple juice bottles to screw with his roommates. I eventually had to ask him to throw the bottles out because the rest of the guys were pretty disgusted by them. Within seconds of me walking into his room and asking, one of the other Niceville guys walked in and asked for some apple juice, poured himself a glass of piss, drank half of it and walked out. That’s it, that’s the end of the story. People from Niceville drink pee.