Using Costas' reasoning, if there were no football this would not have happened either.
In our celebrity-worship culture, idiocy can pass as truth if it is spoken eleoquently enough.
Using Costas' reasoning, if there were no football this would not have happened either.
In our celebrity-worship culture, idiocy can pass as truth if it is spoken eleoquently enough.
The weird part of this is that Costas wasn't really owning the remarks, but repeating someone else's idiotic commentary. By repeating it he certainly played a role in supporting the position, but it was kinda a wimpy thing to do....and this for a guy who reports on FOOTBALL.
Obviously this couple was in crisis and if he didn't have a gun, it would have been another weapon, like the Kitchen Scissors. What are we gonna do...stop people from possessing kitchen scissors, too?
They should focus on making sure that football players are getting the right assistance and lower triggers for intervention to help them get the counseling, treatment, and mental/emotional help they actually needed. In fact, we need that for the rest of society, while I am thinking about it.
Has anybody noticed most of the gun and bow violence of late is mentally ill people and not cold-blooded murderers? Providing systems that allow for early interventions might have prevented some of them.
CC
Indeed. If your friends and neighbors see you acting sketchy, or suspect that you might be depressed, there should be a number they could call to see that you get the help you need; get you a counselor and some meds, and get your guns taken away until your mental health team believes the crisis has passed. We could call the new agency the Societal Tranquility Agency for Special Intervention, or STASI, for short...
Let Me Put This Bluntly: Freedom and dignity is going to cost some dead bodies every year. As long as people have guns, some folks are going to get shot with them; that's just the way it is. As long as people have cars, folks are going to get liquored up and wrap them around trees. As long as there are train tracks, hobos are going to pass out on them. We aren't going to put Nerf padding on the corners of the world, and I wouldn't want to live in the Minority Report-meets-Demolition Man world where they had.
Last edited by Tamara; 12-03-2012 at 08:09 AM.
He used a gun, and Cain killed Abel with a rock ... I think there's a clue in there somewhere.
I leave it to you, Tamara, to take this to the extreme. It was certainly not my suggestion...but yours. You can take ANY initiative and turn it into a STASI-scare, whether it's the USDA, Aetna, or the CIA. We don't do that here in America because we have protections against those extremes.
Empirically, we know that football players are subject to head injuries and there is a lot of pressure in the NFL...money, fame, pushing performance, high expectations, high pressure. The BUSINESS of the NFL should include monitoring the mental/emotional health of their players as a matter of routine checkups. That is a part of the risk to the business and needs to be addressed like ANY work-related risk assessments. And, remember, I was the one who pointed out that the gun was not the issue, so why would I advocate taking them.
Outside of the NFL is, of course, a different situation because we are referring to the general public. However, we are ALL a part of a family, a business, a community group, etc. And, YES, it IS our responsibility as family members, good neighbors, co-workers, and citizens to look out for each other. In most of these cases the family or someone close to these people knew they were unstable and, IF systems were in place to get them help, could have perhaps prevented some of these tragic killings. That can be done without the extreme measures that you are proposing...and, in fact, IS done everyday for people who belong to organizations that provide Emergency Assistance Programs (EAP), and intervention counseling services. BTW, it was determined that there was a mental health gap in the Virginia Tech shootings that would have likely prevented his violent rampage, but people/organizations were negligent and his intervention never occurred.
CC
That's because I'm an extremist. Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.
You know how people are always talking about how it's better that we let a guilty man walk free than punish an innocent man? How come this same level of scrutiny isn't applied to people's other rights?
How many innocent people are you willing to see "helped", drugged into docility and stripped of their Second Amendment rights, in order to avert the occasional statistical outlier like Cho? (Because this kind of stuff is NEVER misused or abused; it only gets used to help those who really need it...)
ESPN analyst and ex-Denver Bronco Tom Jackson said it best: "This has little to do with football. Jovan Belcher left a 3 month old child parentless and before he committed suicide, he was a murderer." This isn't a tragedy for the Kansas City Chiefs and the NFL, it's a tragedy for the slain mother and infant. Belcher was obviously another dirtbag, only difference he was a millionaire dirtbag who got to play games for a living. Our history dictates that he are a savage species and there is no denying or escaping that. Bob Costas is and assclown, always has been, always will be. My ears usually go shut when he speaks up anyway.
Edits in caps... Let's go all the way, why don't we.?
The whole notion of "somebody shoulda done something" rings hollow for me on this. From the accounts I've read, nobody suspected anything beforehand. To use this incident as the rallying cry for more "proactive intervention" feels like guilt winning out over facts in evidence. Pandering in pursuit of further erosion of Liberty.
"No free man shall ever be debarred the use of arms." - Thomas Jefferson, Virginia Constitution, Draft 1, 1776
When we see something terrible, there is frequently a desire to prevent terrible things from happening. The snag is that much of the time the people who would really like to see tragic things prevented don't have a clue how they could have stopped it.
In modern society this instinct has been turned into a trade-able commodity, where this instinct has been nurtured into an expectation that someone should be able to stop these things from happening.
"Do Something!" is frequently the rallying cry of the moron. It's not unexpected to see a four year old asking her daddy why someone didn't stop a flood or a hurricane or something else that caused a tragedy. To see fourty year olds asking essentially the same question is deplorable.
EDIT-
Look at the case of that homeless dude that the NYPD cop gave boots to. The dude is walking around barefoot again, and told reporters he wants a "piece of the pie" for his picture going essentially viral. That guy wasn't barefoot in winter because he was helpless, he was barefoot in winter because he's hopeless.
You can't fix people who decide to be screwed up. You can't contrive a social system that stops them from doing bad things to themselves or others.
All that can be done in this world is to mitigate the costs and consequences of their screwed up decisions...and maybe structure policies to make them bear the full responsibility for being an idiot.
Last edited by TCinVA; 12-03-2012 at 10:12 AM.