As I was driving to Atlanta for the SEC Championship game, I glanced at my twitter feed on my phone and saw the tragedy that had happened in Kansas City. My reaction was, "Here we go again."
Why?
I think back to the tragedy of Steve McNair. We all reflected back to his warrior like mentality on the football field and being the centerpiece of the Tennessee Titans glory days.
As the smoke began to clear, a dark cloud and sad tragedy became unearthed.
Unless you were a Kansas City Chiefs fan, you didn't really know who Jovan Belcher was. In Kansas City, he was a story about overcoming the odds to be a starter in the NFL, even if it was with one of the worst teams in the league.
Now, Jovan Belcher's name will live in infamy, as the man who murdered the mother of his infant child and then turned the gun on himself in front of his Head Coach and General Manager.
The conversations I've heard on TV and radio talked about the mental aspects of this tragedy, how someone could catch the signs of distress and maybe able to intervene with help before it's too late.
That's the conversation that needs to be had.
We can all look at situations like this and place a scenario that is familiar to our everyday lives. However, the truth is these players live a much different life than we dol
Jovan Belcher may have been a great teammate, but that now doesn't dilute the fact he was a murderer.
To the Kansas City Chiefs credit, they handled it the right way in Arrowhead Stadium before their kickoff with the Carolina Panthers. They held a moment of silence to pay respects to a tragedy, and didn't honor anyone in any way. They acknowledged the tragedy and paid respects to all that were involved and effected.
However, it never ends there, even when it should. The subject in this tragedy turned from the real issue (intervention and being there as a friend, coach, teammate, family, etc. when problems come afloat) to.......GUN CONTROL!
This is where I believe, the conversation gets into stupid mode. Jovan Belcher and Kassandra Perkins have now become a political football to push an agenda.
As witnessed last night in the NBC Broadcast of Sunday Night Football, Bob Costas made a commentary on the tragedy referencing a piece that was written by Jason Whitlock of the Kansas City Star.
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"You knew it was coming. In the aftermath of the nearly unfathomable events in Kansas City, that most mindless of sports clichés was heard yet again, ‘Something like this really puts it all in perspective.’ Well if so, that sort of perspective has a very short shelf life since we will inevitably hear about the perspective we have supposedly again regained the next time ugly reality intrudes upon our games. Please.
Those who need tragedies to continually recalibrate their sense of proportion about sports, would seem to have little hope of ever truly achieving perspective. You want some actual perspective on this? Well a bit of it comes from the Kansas City-based writer Jason Whitlock, with whom I do not always agree, but, who today, said it so well that we may as well just quote or paraphrase from the end of his article.
“Our current gun culture,” Whitlock wrote, “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. 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.”
Reading those words, I have to ask one question: What is more deadly? A gun or your mind? If a gun can mentally empower us into making us invincible, wouldn't the mind be more powerful than the gun? I understand in our culture with music, movies, and video games that firearms are very glorified. If guns are the problem, do we get rid of the other outlets that glorify them? If you said yes, you're more stupid than I thought.
What started as a tragedy and turned into a conversation about battling demons with the help of people closest to you, has now turn into a political agenda push that has gone full retard.
That's a shame, because the families of Jovan Belcher and Kassandra Perkins will now be the centerpiece of a new game, and that game is played with the most disengenous rules.
I grieve for the city of Kansas City, the Belchers, and the Perkins family and hope this tragic story can one day help an NFL player who sees a teammate or a colleague in trouble, be willing to help.
However, it's now been tainted with a political agenda.
