Steelers president Art Rooney II said last week there is "no guarantee" that a player has never brought a firearm into the locker room at 3400 South Water St., but he's confident in player compliance with the club's policy on guns and hasn't heard of anything that would constitute even an attempted violation.

That sounds about right.

There probably never have been guns in the Steelers locker room at the practice facility, or at least, that would be my assessment. If there were, a certain defensive back might have been shot for guaranteeing a win against New England in 2007.

Now that right there is the kind of crack that would probably get me suspended from the NBA, where commissioner David Stern continues to be tougher on guns than President Barack Obama would dare attempt to be.

In case you missed it (and kudos on that), Stern suspended Washington Wizards star Gilbert Arenas indefinitely this week, without pay, not so much for bringing four unloaded handguns to the Verizon Center in downtown D.C. as for joking about a locker room incident in which he pointed one at teammate Javaris Crittenton.

Who instantly drew his own piece on Arenas.

On Christmas Eve.

So how's the league's recurring image problem coming along, Commish?

Stern was originally content to let local and federal authorities investigate and possibly impose the sanctions of Washington's strict gun laws and/or the applicable federal statutes on one or both players, but when the Wizards encircled Arenas before a game at Philadelphia and laughed uproariously as he pointed his index fingers like six-shooters at them, Stern went for Gilbert's throat.

Arenas's actions, Stern said, left him "not currently fit to take the court in an NBA game."

Given the checkered disciplinary history of the some of the league's personnel, that stings more than it ought to.

But as accomplished a shooter as he is, Arenas has never made himself familiar with any of the nation's gun laws. He pleaded guilty to carrying a concealed weapon in San Francisco in 2003, and ignorance of D.C. metro gun laws and the NBA policy that prohibits guns in any building owned by the league or its member clubs is Arenas's only possible excuse, unless he thought it was the annual Bring Your Gun To Work Day.

For the record, Major League Baseball's policy is similar to the NBA's. The NHL defers "to the gun laws of the local munipality" according to a spokesman, and the Steelers' policy is simply the extension of the NFL's.

"Our policy prohibits guns on the premises and anywhere that the organization has a function, and that applies to any employee," Rooney said. "Obviously you can't always be sure someone isn't concealing a weapon, so there's no guarantee it doesn't happen here. We've tried hard to educate our players on responsible gun ownership."

Of all the somewhat startling facets of the Arenas incident, the knucklehead decision to bring weapons to the arena is perhaps most striking. Whereas Heinz Field, for example, has perhaps the most elaborate security in the NFL, the full impact of it does not apply to players.

"They don't go through a pat-down or anything," Rooney said. "But on the other hand they are going to a place where they change their clothes so I should think that makes it harder to conceal a weapon. We have a lot of employees in the locker room at Heinz Field, so I think something like that would be noticed."

By way of full disclosure, the Post-Gazette has a similar policy, preventing any kind of weaponry on its premises, meaning of course that copy editors still have to be strangled manually.

Kidding! I kid the copy editors.

In any case, by the weekend, the Washington Wizards were reportedly poised to spring into action on this (just two weeks late), and not by agreeing to change their name back to the Bullets. They were prepared to fine team members who seemed to enjoy Arenas's gun-miming antics so thoroughly.

The only other ripple came from the offices of the New Jersey Nets of all places, where losing 32 of the first 35 hadn't dissuaded management from any of its instincts. Since the Arenas-Crittenton showdown was apparently over a gambling debt, the Nets banned gambling on all team flights. I'm glad they weren't arguing about seat belts.

For the moment, we're left to ponder the implications of Stern's original comments, specifically that Arenas likely faced suspension "or worse."

Arenas is losing $147,200 per game, has had his Twitter account silenced, got informed of his suspension on his birthday and faces a highly uncertain pro future, all for being an admitted goofball.

On the upside, he was named National Rifle Association Eastern Conference Player of the Week.

Gene Collier's "Two-Minute Warning" videos are featured exclusively on PG+, a members-only web site from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.