As most people who watched even a small portion of any football game this weekend can attest to, Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher murdered his girlfriend before committing suicide in front of his head coach and general manager.
However, the liberals have sounded that clarion call once again for gun control.
Bob Costas went on a rant during his halftime segment about the need for gun control. Costas quoted heavily from a piece written by Jason Whitlock who is based in Kansas City.
Whitlock threw out the standard arguments for gun control –
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.
Here is his opinion about guns in general.
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.
And his capstone argument was this:
What I believe is, if he didn’t possess/own a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today.
What Whitlock fails to realize is that a gun by itself cannot kill a single individual. A gun by itself is not violent. Whitlock also fails to mention that gun control does not stop, much less even deter, violence.
What happened to Kasandra Perkins was a tragedy. She was murdered by her boyfriend. According to reports, Belcher shot her nine times. Whitlock’s piece did not mention that amount of rage within Belcher. To say that she would still be alive if Belcher did not own a gun is naïve. He had reached a point that he wanted to kill her. People need to remember that aspect. He died a murderer — who shot his girlfriend nine times!
BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!
He wanted her dead!
Since Mr. Whitlock shared his beliefs on the matter, I am going to do the same. If Belcher did not own a gun that morning, he would have killed her with his bare hands – probably by beating her to death.
There is no such thing as gun violence. It is an oxymoron. An inanimate object can neither be violent or peaceful. Claiming that gun control would deter violence is delusional. Gun control only worsens the situation. (Do a Google search on the number of murders in Chicago, i.e. the most violent city in the world, for the past couple of years. Then take into consideration that Chicago has some of the most restrictive gun control laws in the country.)
The real problem here is that we are a disconnected society. We hide behind the illusions of connectedness – 762 Facebook friends, 1500 Twitter followers, and cell phones for everyone in the family – but there are no personal connections there.
People do not even know who their neighbors are, but they have 700 “friends” on Facebook. People get live instantaneous updates from people they follow on Twitter, but they cannot tell you who their child’s math teacher is.
What Americans need is to realize that they have lost the ability to communicate to one another, the ability to interact with each other, and most definitely — the ability to peacefully resolve conflicts.
What we need is to turn off the TV, the computer, the cell phones, and actually talk to the people in our lives. What we need is to actually take the time to personally invest ourselves in the people who are in our lives as much as we spend looking at someone’s avatar.
What we need is to be human.
