It’s curious how some people can be so passionate about the Second Amendment and so utterly opposed to the First.
Sportscaster Bob Costas had the temerity, in the wake of the murder-suicide perpetrated by Kansas City Chief’s linebacker Jovan Belcher, to mention the tragedy of gun violence in America at halftime on NBC’s Sunday Night Football this past weekend, and you would have thought he had called for the overthrow of the United States government, the banning of Christmas and the cancellation of Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.
What did Costas say to get some people so fired up? Here’s the transcript:
“Those who need tragedies to continually recalibrate their sense of proportion about sports, would seem to have little hope of ever truly achieving 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. In the coming days, Jovan Belcher's actions, and its possible connection to football, will be analyzed. Who knows? But here, (wrote Jason Whitlock) is what I believe, If Jovan Belcher didn't possess a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today.’”
That was it. No
Network-styled shouting from the broadcast booth, no Biblical rending of garments and gnashing of teeth, no call to outlaw guns or repeal the Second Amendment or even to evaluate America’s existing gun laws, just one man’s (actually, two men’s) opinion. Agree or disagree as you wish, just a simple opinion and a open opportunity for meaningful conversation.
For that horrible crime, Bob Costas has been crucified in the social media and in other forums of popular (but not always polite) discourse. Apoplectic calls for Costas to be fired by NBC have numbered in the thousands while many more viewers were shocked – shocked! - that Costas dared raise the subject at all, even during that portion of the program in which he delivers his own commentary every week. “There’s no place in sports for politics” was a common theme among the torch-wielding mob.
Hogwash. Although it may not often seem so, professional sports are played - and announced - by real people who live in the real world, and sports and politics have been inextricably intertwined since, well, since sports and politics began. When Jesse Owens raced to glory against a field of runners and Adolf Hitler, sports mingled with politics on an international stage. When the Astros’ Rusty Staub and Bob Aspromonte earned a ticket out of Houston for refusing to play on the national day of mourning for Robert F. Kennedy, sports and politics went head to head on the baseball diamond. When the NBA’s Phoenix Suns more recently donned “Los Suns” uniforms in protest of Arizona’s anti-immigrant SB 1070, or when the NFL’s Green Bay Packers announced their support of collective bargaining rights for Wisconsin’s embattled public workers, sports and politics were all but one and the same. And for conservatives with short memories, every time a baseball game is interrupted for the singing of “God Bless America”, sports takes a moment for a word from politics.
The most witless and tired argument against Costas, though, comes in the form of the tut-tutting chorus of those who say – as they always do - that it’s “too soon” or “not appropriate” to have this discussion within days after a high-profile incident of gun violence.
Too soon, or too late? And if not now, when?
And since when did believing in the Second Amendment preclude believing in the First?