This Week in Off-Topic: A Short Response to the Bob Costas Backlash

Costas wasn't wrong to talk guns
Photo via IMDB

Bob Costas wasn't wrong for pontificating about guns on Sunday night. He wasn't wrong for the timing. He wasn't wrong for taking a pro-gun control stance (I am very much pro-2nd Amendment, but the key phrase in the language of it is "well-regulated."). He was wrong for implying that Jovan Belcher and more importantly Kasandra Perkins would still be alive if he didn't have a gun. It's clear to me that the gun didn't make him kill the mother of his child, and I doubt that if he didn't have a gun that he wouldn't have laid a finger on her. Domestic violence is real, and it is way underaddressed by a society that would rather get uproarious about false rape charges than real rape that continues to go unreported, instead of, y'know, getting in a tizzy about both.

We need to focus more attention on curing the root causes of these ills that cause gun violence and not blithely try to live in a fantasy world where we can blame the wrongdoings of people on the conveyance of action rather than what lurks in their minds. Whether Belcher was a troubled individual, afflicted by CTE like many of his peers in the NFL, or whether he was the product of an awful nurturing environment when he was growing up, something caused him to hold the life of his girlfriend and his daughter in such little regard that he would end the former's life and leave the latter without any parental figure to grow up with. That's what we should be focusing on here.

And Costas was wrong for not only citing Jason Whitlock, but for leaning on his argument so much that it made him look unoriginal, but that's neither here nor there.