Bob Costas uses Jovan Belcher tragedy to advocate for gun control

By Houston Mitchell

Dec. 3, 2012 12 AM PT

Bob Costas used his halftime segment on NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” to advocate for gun control after Saturday’s murder-suicide involving Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher.

Costas said: “In the coming days, Jovan Belcher’s actions and their possible connection to football will be analyzed. Who knows? ..... If Jovan Belcher didn’t possess a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today.”

Belcher shot and killed Perkins, the mother of his 3-month-old daughter, on Saturday morning, then drove to Arrowhead Stadium and committed suicide at the team’s practice facility.

What Costas said:

“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 its 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.”

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