See what Bob the Broadcaster does here? He is blaming not just the “gun culture,” but everyone who believes it was inappropriate for him to use Sunday Night Football to blame millions of law-abiding Americans for the heinous actions of one man.
In an interview with New York Times media reporter Bill Carter that appeared in Tuesday’s editions, Costas said: “I think most reasonable people think we do not have sufficient controls on the availability of guns and ammunition.” In response to the angry reaction his statements generated across social media and the blogosphere on Monday, Costas was defiant.
Defiance plus ignorance is still ignorance. Costas would do himself a favor by researching crime rates in the areas of the United States that have the strictest gun control laws, and compare those crimes rates with areas where gun control laws are less restrictive. He would also do himself a favor by looking at the impact of gun control laws worldwide.
But that would require him to do more than just read someone else’s columns or say whatever his producers load up on his teleprompter, wouldn’t it.
In the case of Jovan Belcher, it’s emerging today that he had anger problems from the age of 12, and had longstanding rage issues when it came to women. He never had a father figure in his formative years, thanks to the culture of out-of-wedlock births in which Belcher was born. Emerging evidence suggests that Belcher never really grew up, and that he abused alcohol and drugs and ran around on the mother of his daughter. His formative life left him totally unprepared for anything that stardom in the NFL granted him, and he never took the affirmative step of correcting the course that he knew he was on.
Why are none of these issues relevant to Costas, but inanimate objects are? And why does Costas never consider that if Kasandra Perkins had been armed when Belcher, a massive professional athlete who hunted quarterbacks for a living, confronted her, she might be alive today?
A pistol could well have saved her life, every bit as much as a pistol was used by a bully to end it.
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