A question for SenorBeef: Looking at all the responses to the provided links, would you say that any of the pro-gun reactions fall into what you call the “shrieking” catagory?
He is entitled to his opinion. As am I. But, things being what they are, he can show his ass to millions by climbing up on his soapbox and expressing it in an inappropriate forum where there is no chance for refutation.
That’s how it goes, I guess, which leaves us one alternative: stop watching Sunday Night Football if we care. I won’t do that simply because he could say that same thing every week and it wouldn’t matter. The people vote with their wallets every time they buy a handgun, the courts have given handguns specific protection, and the fight is over. His commentary was quixotic at best, and probably the worst thing that he did last night was quote Jason Whitlock, a buffoon with an article.
I’m sure there are, but this isn’t the first time we’ve gone through this. One big particular shooting becomes a media story, and suddenly there are outcries of the need for gun control. Happens every time. Ironically, that’s pretty infrequently, since big mass shootings or other dramatic shootings are shockingly rare. I mean that sincerely - in a country with 300m people and 80m guns, and all the stresses of modern life, you’d think someone would snap and go on a shooting spree every day. The fact that it happens every few months or less is sort of insanely infrequent when you think about it. Making the idea that there’s an epidemic that we must solve all the more absurd.
So anyway, people latch onto these narratives - I emphasize this point because it’s not as if people are saying “huh, gun deaths are up 15% this year, let’s look into that” - they’re being lead around the nose by the media and only becoming aware of a story through their visceral, emotional reaction to it. Remember how before 9/11, 2001 was “Summer of the Shark” and people were talking about how dangerous being in the ocean was, when it was actually a totally normal year for shark attacks, they were infrequent, and yet the deliberate sensationalizing by the media created the impression that they were rampant?
Same deal here. Some dude killing his wife in a moment of passion has happened a billion times in history. The media has decided to latch onto this one and suddenly it goes from background noise to A Problem We Must Solve. And the solutions are usually ill-conceived idiotic plans that do nothing but inconvenience good people.
So yeah, gun advocates become a little wary when some sensationalist media craze suddenly has people clamoring for new laws. But again, it’s essentially defensive in nature. No one would have to be out there saying that we shouldn’t make rash policies based on this if there weren’t other people insisting that we should.
I am against gun control legislation in general, and I don’t think politics has any place in sports “journalism”, but given that this was an NFL player and the shooting had happened just two days ago, I think it was (barely) within what I consider acceptable limits for political bloviating from sports pundits. If he was just commenting on a random shooting somewhere in the country, without any connection to football, that would be different (and unwarranted).
Regarding his actual point, he’s a moron. I wonder what kind of government regulations would have prevented this guy from owning a handgun, short of an outright total ban. And if the NFL is really concerned about their drugged-out players going crazy and shooting people, they should just put a clause in their contracts that bans gun ownership. See how far they get with that.
If a person is worried that owning a gun will “exacerbate their flaws”, then they are free not to buy a gun. And people are certainly free not to associate with or spend time around people they judge to be unstable gun owners if that makes them feel uneasy.
The occasional mass shootings in the US are terrible tragedies, but they are statistically irrelevant (and occur all over the world, even places with strict gun laws - that guy in liberal paradise Norway managed to cause plenty of havoc). I would be fine with laws that prevent the mentally ill from owning guns, if that would make anyone feel better. Beyond that - there is a price you pay for freedom.
People making outcries for gun control do them when there aren’t massacres too, they just get less attention. Some people feel “every few months or less” is insanely frequent, and the blase way people just shrug them off is crazy.
Nobody ever proposes changing gun control laws over a single incident. They propose that an incident (or many of them) illustrate the need for change in gun control laws. Not that it matters much, because the response is always the same: no changes are ever necessary and how dare you bring it up, you’re politicizing a tragedy.
And damn that Jovan Belcher . I watch football to see football, not to hear about killings. If I wanted to hear about those, I’d watch CSI or something.
I would say that anyone that thinks a snapping and going on a killing spree incidents a year in a country of over 300 million utterly awash in guns - or with such freedom of speech as to allow people to research bomb making techniques - as frequent truly has no sense of scale and perspective. Humans are bad at evaluating relative risk, and they’re similarly bad at evaluating scale. They go with what resonates with them viscerally rather than truly trying to comprehend the size and scale of our society to truly realize how amazingly smoothly things generally run.
To take guns out of the equation for a moment, think about all the hysteria there was about kidnappings in the mid-2000s. You had a few high profile cases where the media focused so much hype on a few stories, and you had parents hysterical, reacting as if there were some sort of kidnapping epidemic. If people started responding to that by saying that we must get all our kids chipped like our pets because of this kidnapping epidemic, there’d also be people stepping in saying “actually, the kidnapping rate has declined for the last 20 years, and it’s extremely low, and there’s no reason to enact huge new laws to counter what isn’t a significant problem”.
But because people cannot put things into perspective, and understand the scale of the world, they fall for narratives rather than statistics to form their worldview.
Agreed. And had Belcher stabbed his girlfriend 38 times with a kitchen knife and slit his own throat, Costas would have said nothing about how cutlery is too available in society.
And even if he did, he’s a fucking sportscaster, and I don’t care about his opinions on social matters. He can support SSM or want to execute sodomites. Does he speak well about football? Good…talk about that…and keep your yap shut about anything else during MY valuable airtime.
It’s the Arkansas gun fan. If a massacre has just happened, it is too soon. If one hasn’t happened, clearly nothing needs to change.
There’s a point to be made here though that auto-labels like “shrieking”, “slippery slope”, “anti-gun nuts” that have a “secret gun-ban agenda” and the like are designed to deliberately cut off any and all social discourse on the subject. From the links provided, could you perhaps show a sample of anti-gun “shrieking” so we know what to avoid when talking on the subject?
If you bring up an issue for political debate exactly because there’s a narrative on the stage that affects people viscerally and you hope that their emotional reaction to it either changes their chance or pushes them into action, that exactly, and deliberately is politicizing a tragedy.
Maybe. I can think of a handful of events where sports and society (or the rest of the world, if you like) collide, and I might have a thing or two to say about the bigger picture. The whole Michael Vick thing, for example. The episode where whatshisface from the Giants shot himself in the leg at a nightclub. Sandusky. Now that I think about it, I’d be talking a lot on this show.
If he pulled out Jack Chick pamphlets and spewed hateful dogma, I’d think that was just stupid and offensive. If he talked about how kids without stable, engaged families is a problem, and he had a good basis for his comments, I think that might be relevant but not a good time to raise that issue because of the much bigger problem of people thinking about the deaths of two rather young people.
If Costas had made an impassioned, thought-out speech about how this incident shouldn’t be used as an excuse to take away our Second Amendment rights? I think my main reaction would be, “Who knew Bob Costas was another Charleton Heston? I never saw that coming!” I’d probably think less of him, but I doubt I’d be outraged that he said it.
Now, if he did some moronic bit that’s more worthy of Joey and the Fat Pig on the KBBL Morning Zoo and SportsTalkZone (sponsored by Crapola Lite Beer! Catch the BUZZZZ), that was just the typical vapid yelling and “controversial opinions” I hear on some sports shows as I’m changing stations, in which Costas blamed Obama for the girlfriend not having a concealed weapons permit and shooting back, I’d probably issue a fatwa.
Are you going to really make me dig through public comments on some other forum for evidence? We’ve all been through the control debates a hundred times, we know how these things work. I’m not going to do busywork.
About 3 million people die each year in the US. Anything that kills maybe 100-200 people per year can pretty much be shrugged off. Choking on food kills 3,000 adults per year, let alone kids!
Even if you look at all gun murders in general, not just the mass shootings that get so much media coverage, you’re looking at pretty small numbers. Last I heard, non-suicide gun deaths amounted to approximately 10,000 per year in the US. That sounds like a lot, but there are over 300,000,000 people in the US. That amounts to 1 in 3,000 people. And not all of those deaths would be eliminated by banning all guns, since some people would just substitute other weapons. You’re not going to eliminate violence by banning guns.
Every time there is a tragedy such as this, it seems, the NRA announces “Now is not the time to talk of gun control!”.
They deserve whatever push back comes their way for this bit of nonsense, in my opinion.
Costas apparently is quite sure that the shooting was caused or enabled by the availability of handguns rather than concussions, or steroids, or something else in the NFL over which Costas might have some kind of influence. One wonders why he is so sure.
Regards,
Shodan
People who support gun control tend to support gun control all the time, not just the day after a highly publicized shooting. And a legitimate issue for debate is a legitimate issue for debate regardless of the timing. “Politicizing a tragedy” is a phony charge, and people use it because they don’t want to have that debate today and they know people won’t be paying attention to the issue tomorrow. So the entire accusation is a distraction and I don’t think much of it. I don’t know that any gun law would have prevented the shooting in Kansas City, and on the face of it it seems unlikely. Whitlock (who I reiterate is an idiot) was probably making a larger argument about guns and I am not sure I’d agree with anything he had to say about it. I will say the Stand Your Ground law in Florida is terrible and it’s basically a tragedy waiting to happen, and I will say that there is something wrong with people like Michael Dunn. What can be done about people like that is a much tougher question.
Which reminds me: people brought up the concussion and steroids ideas immediately after the shooting, just as they have done with Junior Seau and other players. We’ll see if there is any factual basis for that, but I have yet to hear a football fan accuse any of those people of “politicizing a tragedy.”
You made the accusation, so it’s your busywork to do. But we’ve been on this particular merry-go-round before, haven’t we?
That’s because those are actually related to football, not tangentially related like this, a murderer who just so happened to have a high-profile job.