Costas Falls Off Pedestal

            Tragically, this past Sunday, Kansas City Chief’s Jovan Belcher took his own life after taking the life of his girlfriend, Kasandra Perkins.  These stories are always heart wrenching.  Young people with so much potential both personally and professionally, waste it all, and often choose to take someone else’s life as well.  So many emotions and thoughts surface immediately following an incident like this.  Those who knew and loved Jovan, grieved over his death while harboring anger over his actions in killing a young woman and making a young girl an orphan.  Quarterback Brady Quinn expressed his thoughts at a news conference that day: 

     I know when it happened, I was thinking in my head, thinking what I could have done differently.  When you ask someone how they are doing, do you really mean it?  When you answer someone back how you are doing, are you really telling the truth?  We live in a society of social networks, with Twitter pages and Facebook, and that’s fine, but we have contact with our work associates, our family, our friends, and it seems like half the time we are more preoccupied with our phone and other things going on instead of the actual relationships that we have right in front of us.  Hopefully, people can learn from this and try to actually help if someone is battling something deeper on the inside than what they are revealing on a day-to-day basis.

            I applaud Brady Quinn’s analysis.  He spoke with sensitivity and understanding.

            I wish I could say the same for Bob Costas, a sports commentator I have enjoyed and admired for many years.  Sunday, during the half-time break of the Chief’s game, he fell headlong off the pedestal I had provided for him.  Bob decided this was a good time to make a political statement, calling for more stringent gun control.  He mostly quoted from a column written by Jason Whitlock. 

     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, 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, is what I believe.  If Jovan Belcher didn't possess a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today.

            Granted, these are Whitlock’s words, or a paraphrase of them, but Bob Costas adopts them when he praised Whitlock for writing them.  Really, Bob and Jason?  You really believe someone who is bent on killing another person will not find a way to do so if guns are removed from the options?  Do you think Nicole Brown Simpson would be alive today if all the knives were removed from every kitchen in America?  On the same day Whitlock wrote and Costas pontificated, a young man named Christopher Krumm  in Casper, Wyoming killed his father’s girlfriend, then went to the college where his father was a professor, and killed him as well, before killing himself.  Not a shot was fired.  A bow, some arrows, and a knife were the murder weapons.

            In 2010, 67.5% of all U.S. murders were committed with a firearm.  That means 32.5% were committed with other weapons such as knives, blunt objects, and human body parts (e.g. fists, feet).  Whitlock and Costas probably don’t want to be confused by the facts, but here’s just two they should consider:  1) The 31 states with liberal concealed weapons laws also have a 24% lower murder rate than the ones that have the more restricted laws.  2) The 2 cities with as couple of the highest violent crime rates in the U.S., Washington, D.C. and New York City, also have the most restrictive gun laws in the country.

            It would appear that the old adage is correct: Guns don’t kill people, people kill people.  Neither do knives, swords, rocks or fists kill people.  They are simply the tools of the murderers.  Costas believes “If Jovan Belcher didn’t possess a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today.”  Well, he must have some sort of crystal ball to know what would have happened if one element of this incident had been altered.  I wonder if he thinks Nicole Brown Simpson would still be alive today if O.J. had not had access to the kitchen knives? 

            Shame on Costas for using his bully pulpit to promote his own misguided political pet peeve on the same day an innocent life was taken!  And disgrace on him for spouting off on a subject about which he knows so very little.