Sunday Gun Control Rant Misses Target, Kills Logic, Drops Fans

NBC fails once again to recapture its long lost, sports-minded audience. Sunday Night Football is watched by avid football fans who don’t give a damn about reality TV shows or political speeches. NBC interrupted its half-time football telecast to bring sports fans a 90-second gun control rant from Bob Costas. The network-sponsored assault on 2nd Amendment rights, like most of NBC’s programming, misses its target audience by a mile. NBC’s liberal anti-gun message kills logic and drops thousands of fans from its dwindling sports-minded audience.

I can hardly call myself an avid sports fan, but I do watch a fare share of baseball, basketball and football games. When I choose to divert my attention from the negative focus of the news and the lies of political gamesmanship, I, like most sports fans, don’t want to hear the sanctimonious ramblings of a washed-up commentator or the political statements of a network firmly entrenched at the bottom of viewers’ ratings.

NBC’s Sunday Night Football is the life line to NBC/MSNBC’s survival as a viable network. With Chris Matthews, Anderson Cooper, Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz and Lawrence O’Donnell running MSNBC news into the ground, why would NBC want to take their errant shot at the 2nd Amendment?

Costas cited Jason Whitlock’s column promoting gun control with the blind devotion of a mindless, religious zealot. Costas quoted Whitlock’s column while bending his knee in worship of Whitlock’s failed logic,

“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.”

“What I believe is, if he didn’t possess/own a gun, he and Kasandra Perkins would both be alive today.”

“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.”

The assertion that Jovan Belcher and Kasandra Perkins would be alive today if Belcher did not have a gun in his possession defies logic. It was not the gun that killed that killed them. It was Jovan Belcher that did the killing. If Belcher did not own a gun, he could have used a knife like O.J. Simpson did. If Belcher didn’t own a gun he could have used a golf club or a blunt instrument to kill Kasandra in a Martha Moxley-style murder. If Belcher didn’t own a gun, he could have easily strangled Kasandra with his sports-toughened hands and bulging biceps.

Ted Bundy, Gary Ridgway, Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, Jr., and Albert DeSalvo were experts with their murderous hands. 142 known victims were murdered by five killers who didn’t believe in guns. Bundy bludgeoned his victims with crowbars and other blunt instruments. The other four preferred their bare hands to strangle the life from their helpless victims.

How many of the victims would be alive today if they had carried a gun to protect themselves? How many innocent victims of violent crimes would be alive today if they had carried weapons and known how to use them when confronted by those who wished to do them harm?

How many victims of violent crimes would there be in this country if criminals knew that they were the only ones holding the evil weapons? The most violent cities in America are New York, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia and Los Angeles. New York City and Chicago have the strictest gun laws in the nation. Gun control does not save lives. John Lott’s “More Guns, Less Crime” makes the point that in 85,000 jurisdictions across America criminals prefer cities where citizens are unarmed and their victims are defenseless. 11 of the 50 most violent cities in the world are in Mexico where guns are outlawed. 14 of the top 50 are in Brazil where a license to carry is virtually impossible to get. In 2010 there were 8,775 shooting deaths in the U.S. while in Brazil there were 35,233.

Mike Stuckey, a senior news editor at MSNBC, wrote a piece in 2010 that took aim at gun control advocates. Stuckey’s article pointed out that as concealed carry permits increased in the U.S. the number of Americans killed by others with guns decreased from 5.66 per 100,000 people in the 90s to 4.07 in the ten years that followed. “The decline,” he said, followed “a fivefold increase in the number of ‘shall-issue’ and unrestricted concealed-carry states from 1986 to 2006.”

A robber waving a chromed semi-automatic pistol burst into a recovery group’s meeting hall in April of 2009 and shouted “Gimme what you got.” Jim Corley, an attorney with a license to carry permit in South Carolina, was told to hand over his wallet. He reached into his back pocket and “gave him what was there.” A Kel-Tec .32 caliber loaded with a half-dozen hollow points appeared as Corley fired once into the robber’s abdomen. Corley fired again and again, hitting the robber in the neck and a second time in the torso. 18-year-old Kayson Helms of New Jersey ran into the night and died 100 feet away. South Carolina’s “Castle Doctrine” protected Corley from criminal and civil prosecutions in the case.

NBC might do well to examine the demographics of its football viewers. I would venture to guess that a very large percentage of them are hunters. Many of them have concealed weapons permits. Wouldn’t it be ironic if, on a cold, December night, Bob Costas, Chris Matthews, Anderson Cooper, Ed Schultz or Larry O’Donnell were sitting alone in a recovery room when a gun-toting sports fan appears and demands a half-time review of the day’s games? If all the gun-crazed sports fan got was a sanctimonious lecture on gun control, I wonder what the NBC pontificates “would’a got?” Matthews would have wet his pants . . . in fear this time! I doubt there would have been any Jim Corley fans in the room to protect NBC’s Brady worshippers.

They’d all have left the room to take a leak, to get a drink, to order a pizza or, “God forbid,” to watch the Amazing Race in a bitter Revenge!