Poor Judgment by Costas

During the Dallas-Philly game last night, NBC aired a halftime segment, regarding the murder-suicide of KC Chiefs player Jovan Belcher and his girlfriend Kasandra Perkins on Saturday.  This was a horrible tragedy, and it was touching to see the players comforting each other following their win against the Panthers yesterday.  I hope we will all remember both Belcher's and Perkins's families and teammates in our prayers, especially the young child that they had together. 

I was expecting Bob Costas's comments after the segment to follow in the pathos of the somber post-game statement by the Chief's coach (who witnessed Belcher's suicide) in the video and the inspirational image of KC and Carolina players kneeling together in prayer after the game.  Instead, Costas decided to use this tragedy to step onto his soapbox and bring a political slant to the moment.  Aside from the fallacious nature of his statements, his using the moment to make an appeal for stricter gun control was in incredibly poor taste.  Even in responding to Costas's comments, I want to be very respectful: two people are dead and a child is orphaned.  Nonetheless, I can't disregard his comments. 

Are we to believe that domestic violence would not occur if handguns did not exist?  Apparently, Costas does.  Would murders no longer occur if guns were illegal?  Some of the highest rates of gun violence in the U.S. are in Chicago and D.C., which have some of the strictest gun laws in the nation.  Even Great Britain, which has some of the strictest restrictions on gun ownership in the world, has rampant gun violence.  So apparently, more gun control is not going to stop murders from occurring.  I have often said (not that it is original to me) that making gun ownership illegal would just mean that only criminals would have guns: criminals, by definition, disobey the law, so they would have few qualms about possessing guns, while law-abiding citizens would be unarmed, hoping that, should they ever be the victim of a crime, a police officer would by chance be standing nearby to defend them.  

In truth, I haven't been a big Costas fan since the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics when he talked over the entire ceremony raising a tattered U.S. flag recovered from the ruins of the World Trade Center; the entire crowd was silent in somber reverence while Costas chattered away.  Even so, I'll give him the benefit of the doubt - perhaps Costas just doesn't like guns.  Maybe he would just prefer that people chose not to own them rather than that they be outlawed.  I can respect that.  However, his final comment, "If Jovan Belcher didn't possess a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today," is dangerously naive.  Fatal domestic violence tragedies occur everyday, sadly; in many of them, guns are not even a factor.  Costas, or columnist Jason Whitlock, whom he was quoting, making such a statement minimizes this horrible tragedy.