by David Safier
Not being a big sports fan, I'm not one to quote Bob Costas, or Fox Sports writer Jason Whitlock. But I'm going to let Costas speak for himself about the issue of gun regulation as he quotes Whitlock.
By way of background: Kansas Chiefs linebacker Jovan Velcher shot and killed his girlfriend Saturday, then drove to the football stadium and shot himself. In an unrelated incident a week earlier, a man in Florida for his son's wedding asked some teenagers to turn down the music in their car in a parking lot, then got in an argument with them, fired nine shots into the vehicle and killed a 17 year old.
Costas, during halftime on Saturday Night Football, said this:
"In the aftermath of the nearly unfathomable events in KC, that most mindless of sports cliches was heard yet again: Something like this really puts it all in 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. … If Jovan Belcher didn’t possess a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would still be alive today.”
You can watch Costas' full comments below the fold. Here is Jason Whitlock's column.