BOB COSTAS: Well, you knew it was coming. In the aftermath of the nearly unfathomable events in Kansas City, that most mindless of sports clichés was heard yet again: Something like this really puts it all in perspective. Well, if so, that sort of perspective has a very short shelf-life since we will inevitably hear about the perspective we have supposedly again regained the next time ugly reality intrudes upon our games. Please, those who need tragedies to continually recalibrate their sense of proportion about sports would seem to have little hope of ever truly achieving perspective. You want some actual perspective on this? Well, a bit of it comes from the Kansas City-based writer Jason Whitlock with whom I do not always agree, but who today said it so well that we may as well just quote or paraphrase from the end of his article.
"Our current gun culture," Whitlock wrote, "ensures that more and more domestic disputes will end in the ultimate tragedy and that more convenience-store confrontations over loud music coming from a car will leave more teenage boys bloodied and dead."
"Handguns do not enhance our safety. They exacerbate our flaws, tempt us to escalate arguments, and bait us into embracing confrontation rather than avoiding it. In the coming days, Jovan Belcher’s actions, and their possible connection to football will be analyzed. Who knows?"
"But here," wrote Jason Whitlock," is what I believe. If Jovan Belcher didn’t possess a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today."
One major problem with this view is that it simply is NOT back up by the stats or the facts. It may have an anecdotal application here and there, but the overall affect of private gun ownership by law-abiding people is heavily demonstrative of the reality that jurisdictions allow private gun ownership and/or carry have far less violent crime.
Maybe the focus should be upon enforcing the laws of gun ownership. If Jovan Belcher had a drug problem or was using addicted to narcotics--he was now a legal gun owner. If he was drinking and had a gun--he was disobeying the law. If he had domestic abuse issue, and lied about it on his gun purchase application or bought guns any other way--he was violating the law.
Costas says nothing of individual responsibility or the effects of deteriorating family units or living with and having children outside the institution of marriage or the indoctrination of gang-violence and gang-culture upon a persons values. Costas says NOTHING of what getting your head banged around while playing football does to one's psyche and mental processes.
As with so many others, Costas wants to find an easy scapegoat and an easy solution to the increasing violence in society. Sorry folks, but there are none. But lets not throw the baby out with the bath water in our haste to place blame.
Americans did very well with guns up until the other above-mentioned factors and other societal ills became so commonplace.