In a tragedy that has affected a football team, a city, and more importantly a three-month-old little girl, politics has taken center stage where it should not be. Kansas City Chief Jovan Belcher fatally shot his girlfriend, the mother of his daughter, on Saturday morning then drove to the Chiefs’ practice facility and turned the gun on himself in front of his coach and general manager. It was a violent end to two lives but those in the media and on the Left, like NBC Sports analyst Bob Costas, are ghoulishly using this tragedy for political gain.
Gary McCoy / PoliticalCartoons.com (click to view more cartoons by McCoy)
It is Bob Costas’ First Amendment right to say whatever he wants to but using the Sunday Night Football halftime show to preach that guns are evil crossed a line. Costas inserted his personal liberal political views into a sports broadcast where they do not belong. Even worse, instead of pointing the finger at the murderer, Costas blamed the gun.
“If Jovan Belcher didn’t possess a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today,” Costas unequivocally declared. The old axiom that people kill people, guns do not kill people is true. It would have been just as easy for Belcher to have committed this murder-suicide another way. In fact, last week in Wyoming, a man stabbed his father’s live-in girlfriend to death, then killed his father with a bow and arrow, before finally killing himself with a knife. In Bob Costas’ world, if that man did not possess a knife or bow and arrow, they all would still be alive today.
Would Costas have us ban all knives and bow and arrows – or any other item that could be used as a lethal weapon? Cars kill more people every year than guns do, should we ban those, too? Where does it end? It is just silly and banning guns will only leave innocent people without a proper defense.
According to a 1995 Northwestern University study, 2.5 million Americans use guns in self defense every year. There are countless stories out there of how guns have saved lives and have provided a last line of defense. Just last week, a teenager saved his mother’s life with a gun during a domestic violence incident in which his abusive father was beating and choking her.
It’s been reported that Belcher and Perkins were having domestic issues. The truth is, guns are the great equalizer between abusers and their targeted victims. A woman is no match for a 6’ 2”, 228 lb linebacker. In light of this, to use Bob Costas’ logic, if Kasandra Perkins DID possess a gun, it is possible that she and Jovan Belcher would both be alive today.
There are so many other elements to this crime, many still unknown. It was irresponsible and inappropriate for Bob Costas to jump the gun, so to speak, on assigning judgment and blame. He should just stick to what he knows…reading sports off of a teleprompter. He should not preach about gun control on Sunday Night Football and turn this very real tragedy into a political football.
