The stupidity is running fast and thick regarding Jovan Belcher. I don’t know if it started with Jason Whitlock, but it certainly didn’t stop there. After Whitlock’s silliness, Bob Costas doubled down on the stupid by giving the article and Whitlock’s words a national stage with his silly little soliloquy during the Dallas-Philadelphia game on Sunday night.
Today, we have another examples of stupid. An oped at CNN blames a “culture of manliness.” Stop laughing. This guy is serious.
As for the Costas-Whitlock axis of stupid, I’d just point out this picture of Belcher with Miss Perkins. See the size difference? The gun was merely the instrument. Belcher could have killed her in any of a number of ways. And since we’re dealing with absurd scenarios, perhaps if Miss Perkins had been a gun owner herself, she would be alive today.
This case comes back to something simple and, for most of us, unfathomable: Jovan Belcher, for some reason known only to him, decided he was going to kill his girlfriend and them himself. That a gun was used is incidental. If he hadn’t had a gun, he might have used a knife and rope, or his bare hands and slit his wrists, or any one of other equally awful ways to perform his horrific act.
While I’m at it, I came across this post via memeorandum today and, while it kind of blows up the Whitlock argument, it’s not as simple as all that. The writer’s gun ownership might push her “Ex” to purchase his own gun. To be clear, I’m not saying she’ll deserve it if it comes to that (please NO), but the notion that acts of violence are simple “a + b = no harm to me” equations are wrong. There’s always someone bigger, someone with more guns, someone with more resources, someone willing to go to horrible places the rest of us wouldn’t dream of.
Zooming out a bit though, there seems to be a cottage industry in this sort of post hoc analysis. Remember the aftermath of Gabrielle Giffords? or James Holmes and his shooting spree at the Batman Rises premiere? or the Fort Hood tragedy? or the Wisconsin Sikh Temple shooting? All horrible tragedies, all of them producing the same quality journalistic claptrap we’ve got now.
How long until these people learn (ie- pundits and journalists) that it’s impossible to account for the whims of every individual? The simple, admittedly frustrating, fact is we won’t ever really know why any of these people performed their acts. In every case, we can look and find whatever personal bogeyman we might like that makes us feel better about our world views- i.e. what “makes me right.”
Unfortunately, there’s one thing we can be sure of, that there will be a next time. And that it can’t be prevented. The other thing we can be sure of are the displays of media stupidity to follow.