The Jovan Belcher, Kasandra Perkins Murder-Suicide Sadness — Unhelpful (but Representative) Idiocy from Wayne LaPierre, CEO of the National Rifle Association

© 2012 Peter Free

 

07 December 2012

 

 

Necessary background — the (handgun) murder-suicide deaths of Kasandra Perkins and Jovan Belcher

 

Kansas City Chiefs’ linebacker Jovan Belcher shot and killed his significant other at home (in front of his mother and the couple’s 3-month old) and then killed himself at the Chief’s practice facility.

 

NBC Sports announcer Bob Costas shortly thereafter asked Americans (on television) to consider the implications of gun violence.  He quoted and paraphrased from a thoughtful essay written by Fox Sports columnist Jason Whitlock.

 

Excerpts from the Whitlock essay include:

 

I would argue that . . . 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.

 

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.

 

© 2012 Jason Whitlock, In KC, it's no time for a game, Fox Sports (03 December 2012)

  

“Oh the horror, the evil Bob Costas”

 

Gun rights advocates immediately (and predictably) jumped on Costas.

 

Which, even to my gun owning mind, merely proved his and Jason Whitlock’s points about the rabid self-defensive blindness of our American gun culture.

 

 

Disclaimer — I am not at all anti-gun, but I am against rampant Denial

 

If we are going to carry guns around, we had better be intellectually honest about the public health price they extract in one of the most violent economically developed cultures on the planet.

 

In the face of an especially public celebrity sorrow, neither Costas nor Whitlock were out of line for reminding us of these costs.

 

Which brings me to the (illustrative) point to this essay — the symbolizing insanity that comes from the National Rifle Association, in the form of Chief Denier in Charge, Wayne LaPierre.

 

 

Wayne LaPierre showed us what hardcore Gun Lunacy is all about

 

Here is what Mr. LaPierre said about the Belcher-Perkins sadness:

 

National Rifle Association CEO Wayne LaPierre has heard and read what the media is saying about the Jovan Belcher murder-suicide and thinks an element is missing.

 

"The one thing missing in that equation is that woman owning a gun so she could have saved her life from that murderer," LaPierre told USA TODAY Sports on Thursday.

 

© 2012 David Leon Moore, NRA head: Kasandra Perkins should have had her own gun, USA Today (06 December 2012)

  

Yes, that’s the answer — couples should carry firearms around to prevent each other from doing bad things

 

The NRA could start sex-based weapons training so as to show us how to survive spousal gun fights.

 

The NRA’s first rule for spousal self-defense will be:

 

Always be armed, even in your jammies.

Ya never know what your significant other is going to do next.

Shoot for the body mass.

 

The moral? — The price of too easily accessible guns are high numbers of gun deaths and injuries — And we cannot begin to think straight about the nuances of how to reduce those, without first admitting that characteristic human impulsivity and guns do not go well together

 

The public health reality is that a portion of even well trained gun owners will occasionally lose their tempers and resort to the irrational use of deadly force to settle disagreements.

 

Uninsightfully branding these people as “murderers,” without more, avoids dealing with the real problem.

 

A high proportion of us are capable of killing under myriad deplorable circumstances.  Denying this merely reflects ignorance about the human condition.

 

The NRA would be a more useful organization, if it started investigating ways in which to “psychologize” us into to being more careful and self-disciplined with our weapons.  Especially under circumstances in which run-amuck emotions threaten to take us over.

 

But such a policy switch would require:

 

dropping the Association’s habitually expressed Denial,

 

admitting the existence of gun-related public health problems,

 

accepting the trouble-making impulsivity that virtually all of us share,

 

and

 

pursuing the kind of research that explicitly recognizes that the solution to the use of force is not always access to superior countervailing force.

 

These are subtleties that we macho boneheads have difficulty admitting.

 

It is much easier to reflexively lash out at Bob Costas and Jason Whitlock.  And make ourselves look abysmally stupid in the process.