Politicizing Tragedy 101:

Bob Costas Uses Halftime Show of

Sunday Night Football To Call 

For Banning of Handguns

In case you didn't see what Costas did, here's the clip: 

Several observations can be made here, so let's throw'em out: 

1. Chicago has THE strictest control of handguns in the nation.  How's that working out?  Not too swell, actually.  But in the Liberal mindset, this apparently means Chicago doesn't have ENOUGH strict gun control yet.  Just wait until they pass a few more laws, I'm sure they'll fix the problem. 

2.  Guns aren't just used in crimes.  They are also used for self-defense.  Guns don't just take lives, they save them, as the author shows in point #5 here: 

http://www.justfactsdaily.com/five-fallacies-about-guns-and-violence

Fallacy # 5: Guns are rarely used for self-defense

In a commentary published by CNN, David Frum, a CNN contributor and former speechwriter for George W. Bush, asserted that

a gun in the house is not a guarantee of personal security — it is instead a standing invitation to family tragedy. The cold dead hands from which they pry the gun are very unlikely to be the hands of a heroic minuteman defending home and hearth against intruders. They are much more likely to be the hands of a troubled adolescent or a clumsy child.

Like many issues in the field of social science, the question of how often guns are used for self-defense is surprisingly complicated. In the words of the above-cited National Academies of Science study, the

the data on defensive gun uses are … potentially error ridden. Without reliable information on the prevalence of defensive gun use, researchers are forced to make implausible and unsubstantiated assumptions about the accuracy of self-reported measures of resistance.

However, when counting only the bare minimum of defensive gun uses implied by the most rigorous surveys, the number of defensive gun uses far exceeds the number of violent crimes committed with guns.

For example, anti-gun researcher David McDowall and others conducted a major survey of defensive gun use that was published in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology in 2000. The authors did not take their survey results to their logical conclusions by using the common practice of weighting them, but when one does this to find what the results would be for a nationally representative survey sample, the results imply that U.S. civilians use guns to defend themselves and others from crime at least 989,883 times per year. This figure accounts only for “clear” cases of defensive gun use and is based upon a weighting calculation designed to minimize defensive gun uses.

Likewise, when one minimizes the defensive gun uses from a survey conducted by pro-gun researchers Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz that was published in the Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology in 1995, the results imply at least 1,029,615 defensive gun uses per year. For comparison, based upon survey data from the U.S. Department of Justice, roughly 436,000 violent crimes were committed by offenders visibly armed with a gun in 2008.

It's amazing how people accept the fact police officers and soldiers carry guns to protect themselves and others, but somehow a gun in the hands of a private citizen is some kind of public menace.  

3.  The people wringing their hands over the Belcher 'tragedy' so they can use it to politicize the gun issue seem to think murders won't happen if there is no private gun ownership.  Hello? 

It's almost as if some people out there would have been happier if Belcher had strangled his girlfriend then jumped off a bridge. No evil gun involved.....so......better?

4.  NBC & other media keep trying to INCLUDE Belcher in their 'tragedy' talk, as if he himself is some kind of victim of the gun he used.  Like it was some kind of evil voodoo object that bewitched him or something.  Of all the media coverage I saw yesterday, ONLY  Rodney Harrison at the post game show showed any anger at this, pointing out Belcher MURDERED someone.  

This blame the gun, ignore the person who used it mentality has reached bizarre levels when a murder victim is repeatedly described throughout the day as having 'lost her life in a tragedy' so they can somehow include her murderer as a victim of the evil gun he used on her and then himself. 

Needless to say, Costa's absurd pontificating invoked a backlash that NBC is still dealing with.