Sue Ogrocki / AP file

Darrent Williams had played with the Broncos since he was a second-round draft choice in 2005 out of Oklahoma State.

But this was a group of young people out to celebrate the New Year. They did the sensible thing by hiring a limo to drive them. A member or members of the group had a difference of opinion with a person or persons in a club they had visited. Williams’s party left the club – another sensible decision. But they hadn’t gone far before the occupants of an SUV – people who hadn’t been introduced to sensible behavior; that sort of thing makes for lousy lyrics in the songs they listen to - that pulled up alongside them raked the limo with gunfire, wounding three people, Williams fatally.

According to his high school coach in Texas, Williams once ran with what’s euphemistically called the “wrong crowd.” But people who cared about the good person they saw inside him worked to straighten him out. The early accounts say they succeeded; Williams was talking about starting a program for inner city kids when his life was so senselessly ended. He was a kid who could have made a difference. Another kid with a gun — I’m guessing that it was another young man or other young men who did the trigger work — decided Williams’s life was the price of restoring their own pride.

Williams was on his way up thanks to the opportunity a job in the NFL gave him and the education he absorbed from people who cared about him. Spending four years in college was part of that, an experience that exposed him to a different way of life.

For too many Americans, though, an education and a professional career seem impossible to attain. You shouldn’t have to ask how that can happen in a country in which it is easier to get a gun than a college education, a country in which thugs are more celebrated than scientists, a country in which countless kids on street corners can rap with brilliance but in which even CEOs can’t write a coherent memo.

Ireland was once the poorest economy in Europe. In 30 years, it’s made itself the second most prosperous. One of the ways it worked this remarkable transformation was to guarantee an education to everyone and to curtail a lot of social entitlement programs; in essence, Ireland told its citizens that there are no more free rides; we’ll provide the education and the jobs, all you have to do is take advantage of them.

America should be able to do no less. But instead we shovel kids through city schools with no expectation that they’ll learn anything. We do not view a higher education as a right and a vital necessity to the future of the nation, but as a privilege; as tuition continues to climb, government aid to pay for it stays static or decreases with rare exceptions.

Guns are ridiculously easy to get. We’ve waged a war on drunk driving that’s had considerable success, but we don’t have the courage to wage a similar way against the easily obtainable guns that claim so many lives with so little reason.

It was a football player who was killed, but it wasn’t about football. It was about the culture we’ve created, a culture that only we — all of us — have the power to change. The question is, do we have the will?

More news

Jose Yau / AP

Offseason needs for NFC teams

Silva: Each NFL team enters the offseason with a series of pressing needs. Sometimes a team can address them all, sometimes they ignore them all. But if a team's smart, they'll listen to us. These are the most crucial aspects for NFC teams.

Jeff Gross / Getty Images

Wesseling: Offseason priorities for AFC teams

Wesseling: Each NFL team enters the offseason with a series of pressing needs. Sometimes a team can address them all, sometimes they ignore them all. But if a team's smart, they'll listen to us. These are the most crucial aspects for AFC teams.

Headlines

• Label

PFT: Giants' Bradshaw takes shot at Romo

PFT: Ward willing to restructure to stay with Steelers

PFT: Plenty of anti-Peyton sentiment in Washington

Ravens K Cundiff grateful for teammates' support

PFT: Rams name Snead new GM

PFT: Big Ben fires warning shot at new OC Haley

PFT: Dancing man Gronkowski has ankle surgery

O'Donnell set up Tebow with Jenny McCarthy