Today, columnist Jason Whitlock of Fox Sports and formerly of the Kansas City Star, blamed the Second Amendment to the United State Constitution for the murder/suicide of Jovan Belcher, linebacker for the Kansas City Chiefs. Calling for the NFL to have cancelled the Chiefs’ Sunday game, Whitlock wrote:
I would argue that your rationalizations speak to how numb we are in this society to gun violence and murder. 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.
Whitlock never lays responsibility for Jovan Belcher’s murder of his 22-year-old girlfriend and his suicide at the feet of Jovan Belcher. In fact, he describes Belcher as “A 25-year-old kid,” which is simply asinine – at age 25, you are no longer a “kid.” You are a man, with real responsibilities – Belcher had a three-month-old child. But Whitlock blames the culture, blames football (because “young men play a violent game”), blames everybody but Belcher, and says we’re all capable “of the wickedness that exploded inside Jovan Belcher.”
“What I believe is, if he didn’t possess/own a gun, he and Kassandra Perkins would both be alive today,” wrote Whitlock. That’s silly. If Belcher wanted to kill his girlfriend and then himself, he didn’t need a gun to do it. And no matter how much Whitlock propounds that “Handguns do not enhance our safety,” Kasandra Perkins would have had a much better shot at life if she’d been the one with the handgun.
PS: This is hardly the first time Whitlock has put forward an idiotic opinion.
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