NBC's Bob Costas Blames NFL Murder-Suicide On Guns

NewsBusters reported Saturday the tragic murder-suicide involving a Kansas City Chiefs' football player and his girlfriend.

During halftime of NBC's Sunday Night Football, Bob Costas chose to lecture America about how guns were to blame for the incident concluding, "If Jovan Belcher didn’t possess a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

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.”

Yes, because men never killed each other or themselves before the creation of the gun.

Of course, Costas is entitled to his opinion, but does he have to give it during halftime of a nationally televised game?

For those interested, here's Whitlock's entire article without paraphrases.

Update: According to the American Association of Suicidology, roughly 50 percent of 2010's suicides were by firearm. The other roughly 50 percent were by such things as hanging and poisoning.

With this in mind, believing that "If Jovan Belcher didn’t possess a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today" is preposterous.