Bob Costas' NFL Gun Speech
Deconstructed
December 3, 2012
By R. Tamara de Silva
"This year will go down in history. For the first time, a civilised nation has full gun registration! Our streets will be safer, our police more efficient, and the world will follow our lead into the future!"
Adolf Hitler
"Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest."
Mahatma Mohandas K. Gandhi
Bob Costas used the incident of Kansas
City Chief's Linebacker, Jovan Belcher's murder of the mother of his
three-month-old daughter on Saturday before taking his own life as call for more gun control. In Chicago, eight people also died from gun
violence over the weekend.
The causes of murder and suicide, especially inner-city violence are numerous and complex. The causes of gang related shootings involve suboptimal societal and economic factors that have no easy remedy. What is predictable and easy, is to blame the guns used either by a low-life gang-banger or a cold-blooded murderous NFL linebacker. It is easier than blaming the parents of the murderer, his family, teachers, pastor, genetics, mental illness, economic factors, cultural influences, randomness or societal failure in raising yet another psychopathic killer. As is often the norm, whatever the premeditation, mental illness or depravity of the murderer, we shift our blame towards the object used by the murderer-the gun. It happens after almost every publicized shooting, and with a high degree of predictability. Politicians clamor, as they do in Cook County, to abridge the plain language and intent of the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution, to appear like they are "doing something" and to ostensibly express their profound empathy for the victims of murderers by imposing yet more regulations on gun ownership and taxes.
True
to the playbook, yesterday, NBC's ubiquitous sports commentator Bob Costas used the
half-time segment of the Sunday Night Football to call for more gun control,
"In the coming days, Jovan Belcher's actions and their 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." Or he would have found another way to kill her...but this
would not have been newsworthy.
Blaming an inanimate object also subtly removes a layer of culpability
and provides an easier answer, as if the problem of the existence of the
murderer and his intent would be erased just as particles in Heisenberg's uncertainty principle appear and then disappear on the quantum scale- in this instance somehow leaving the presence of the more
culpable gun.
According
to a report by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, guns were involved in
roughly over 65% of violent crimes in 2008.[1]
There are in the aggregate of all municipal, state and federal gun regulations,
well over 14,000 to 19,000 gun regulations on the books. Gun ownership is well regulated. The United States has the highest gun
ownership rate in the world but is 28th in the world in the rate of
murders committed by firearms.[2]
Most people that own guns never commit gun violence. Do all these regulations have the effect of reducing deaths
by gun?
In
Illinois, the answer would be resoundingly in the negative. Illinois is arguably the most gun
restrictive state in terms of the sheer number and nature of its gun
regulations. Chicago is also, in
2012, on track to being the nation's murder capital. Do we have too few gun regulations or too many murderous
criminals?
There
is an unwritten law in politics at any level, if you are going to bring up a
problem, pretend you can solve it-certainly at least say you know how. There is no profit for any candidate
running for elective office in Chicago or anywhere else to simply say that we
have too many really nasty unsocial people in Cook County and that they will kill
you and there is almost nothing, short of moving and trying to avoid these
people, that would save you from them and their unsocial behaviors, in all their possible iterations. In order
to win tell Logic: drop dead.
Blame the gun.
Costas
could have blamed Blecher and the fact that athletic ability is prized more
than character or psychopathic temperament in the NFL but then again he is
hosting an NFL half-time show and this may have been tantamount to going to a
dinner party and denigrating all the food. He could have said that if you are one of the statistically
improbably gifted athletes that can play at the level of the NFL, and attract
the sponsorship revenue of a prime-time NFL game, when you murder your
daughter's mother, someone will offer to blame the gun you used.
However,
there are problems with the "but for" theory of gun accountability. Its principal problem is a failure of
its logic. We cannot blame knives
and forks for the epidemic of obesity that caused the greatest toll on our
health care system or can we? But
for, the knife, a 300 lb, 5"10 man would not have eaten so much because he
would have lacked the means to eat so much macaroni and cheese. But for the glass manufacturer, some
would never have become alcoholics and destroyed their families. But for cars, we would be perfectly protected from DUIs. But for cars, we would also
be unable to have traffic accidents.
But for the sale of paint, we would not have graffiti. But for the Internet, we would not have
online pornography. When you think
upon it, inanimate objects, were you to suspend logic, are pretty nasty social
actors-albeit in varying degrees of accompanying passivity.
Statism v. Individual Responsibility
The
Government can and does legislate desirable social behavior already-often using
inanimate objects. For example,
Mayor Michael Bloomberg banned the sale of super big sugary soft drinks like
super-sized purple Slurpees. He
had good reason-they are very sugary and excess sugar causes weight gain,
diabetes and associated and resultant health problems.
If
the government could rely on you to act rationally at all times, poor Mr.
Bloomberg would not have had to bother to make a law to prohibit you from
ingesting larger sized Slurpees.
His
was not a novel idea. From
mortgage deductions to marriage deductions to restrictions on the purchase of
guns, the government already tries to engineer what it considers socially more
acceptable behavior through the tax code.
But the evidence of its efficacy is mixed, at best. For example, Canada does not have a
mortgage interest deduction and yet more Canadians own their homes than
Americans. Cook County Illinois
proposed a gun tax to prevent in part the "illegal use of guns in murders." Murder is already illegal-at the state
and federal level. Also, it is not
likely, though possible, that gang bangers would be so off-put by having to pay
a tax on gun ownership that they would switch to machetes. Were the politicians in Cook County a
more thoughtful and upstanding cross-section of the populace than their tendency to commit
crime (we do after all have and have had more alderpeople, commissioners, and governors in jail than any other North American city), and take to graft, to engage in bribery and other creative means of "pay for play," to refine the art of nepotism- as they do would suggest they are, (albeit
a counterfactual hypothesis)--they would realize that people inclined to murder
other people in gangs are simply not going to think about the silly tax that
has theoretically been imposed upon them.
The
other silent but more massive cost to the governments' various attempts to
engineer social behavior either by the tax code or by threat of imprisonment,
is that individual freedom and government regulation of social behavior are to
a great extent a zero-sum game.
The more authority the government aggregates to itself to get into the
private lives and lifestyles of its citizens, even to promote "good" and
rational individual behavior, the commensurately less choice the citizen has in
choosing how to live.
Conceivably,
I ought to have a right to be irrational.
I may simply prefer pizza to broccoli and may wish to drink single malt
scotch everyday over kale juice.
My enjoyment value in ingesting French fries everyday may outweigh the
utility I place in living to be a skinny octogenarian.
It is not meaningful what opinion a sportscaster has about a right guaranteed by the Second Amendment any more than it matters what Mr. Costas thinks about positron emission tomography's alleged ability to produce an accurate "picture" of the human brain. What is troublesome is that Mr. Costas, like so many politicians who would offer simple solutions to seemingly insolvable problems, is that he has a pulpit to propagate false solutions and impoverished notions.
This
comes at a time when all branches of government in America today, more than at
any time in its brief history, are determined to assault the Bill of
Rights-because your fundamental liberties as an American cannot defend themselves,
now is not the time to be silent.
My father is a history professor and I learned the value of history
early on. But in studying human
nature more directly, I also learned that history, whether read or not, will
repeat itself.
It
was not that long ago that the governments of Nazi Germany, Socialist Russia
and Fascist Italy disarmed their citizenry. There was no one to defend themselves, their old, their
minorities or their children and neighbors from the atrocities that
followed. Were we to utter that
the odds of this scenario ever repeating itself were greater than nil, we may be called right-wing
extremists or "nuts." Yet just
seventy years ago, disarming the people was exactly what the governments had
engineered, ostensibly in some cases, for the goal of greater safety and social
stability. A trade-off no thinking
person ought to acquiescence to ever again. @
R. Tamara de Silva
Chicago, Illinois
December 3, 2012
