Monday, December 03, 2012

"Handguns do not enhance our safety."

Sportswriter Jason Whitlock writes for FOXSports. He came there from covering the Kansas City Chiefs.

Here's some of Whitlock's reaction to the news that KC linebacker Jovan Belcher had shot the mother of their child, then blown out his own brains at the team facility on Saturday.

… We’ve come to accept our insanity. We’d prefer to avoid seriously reflecting upon the absurdity of the prevailing notion that the second amendment somehow enhances our liberty rather than threatens it.

How many young people have to die senselessly? How many lives have to be ruined before we realize the right to bear arms doesn’t protect us from a government equipped with stealth bombers, predator drones, tanks and nuclear weapons?

Our current gun culture simply 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.

In the coming days, Belcher’s actions will be analyzed through the lens of concussions and head injuries. Who knows? Maybe brain damage triggered his violent overreaction to a fight with his girlfriend. What I believe is, if he didn’t possess/own a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today.

That is the message I wish Chiefs players, professional athletes and all of us would focus on Sunday and moving forward. 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

FOXSport.com

Almost as a amazing as Whitlock's plea for gun sanity is that I know about the column because commentator Bob Costas read an excerpt at halftime on NBC's Sunday Night Football.

I doubt if any of this will faze the fanatics who run the National Rifle Association and the thousands of legitimate gun owners who fall for the paranoid fantasies that fill the NRA's coffers. But we can hope ...

1 comment:

Rain Trueax said...

They also aren't a total solution to such senseless crimes as witnessed by the recent slaying of a father and his girlfriend by the father's son using a bow and knife. We had a very brutal slaying here in Oregon with probably a machete. Somehow we have to have better ways to deal with mental illness and that won't solve it all either. Humans are violent and the solution too often is to use violence which for most of us is beyond imagining as to why. The young man who nearly killed Gabby Giffords could have slain her and those with her with a machete if he hadn't had access to the gun. It's a deadly weapon in a young person's hands. But if we had gotten him before he got to that point and forced treatment when he didn't want it, that might've left a lot of people still alive. I am all for limits on who can buy guns and the types but I also know it won't end these kinds of violent, seemingly (to us) senseless slayings. Our constant wars don't help as it seems when we are at war this kind of thing is more frequent which goes with what I've said that we think we can spill the blood over there but it comes back here anyway. Our entertainment that glorifies killing doesn't help but how do you do something about that in a country that believes in freedom of speech and expression?