Politics doesn’t mix well with entertainment venues such as sports. Sports are the circuses of our era that help to distract the people from the reality in which they live. Once in a while somebody in the world of sports opens their mouth on a political issue and raises all kinds of havoc. Bob Costas decided to be one of those people and gave a speech advocating gun control during a halftime show during a football game:
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 …
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.
Obviously Bob Costas doesn’t know his job is to distract the serfs from politics, not remind them of it. The Romans knew that the secret to keeping the people docile was to give them bread and circuses. So long as the people were fed and entertained they were very willing to roll over and let the Roman government do as it pleased. The average American isn’t much different, which is why politics is such an incredibly caustic thing to mix with sports.
Not only did Costas perform the sin of mixing politics and sports but he did a lousy job of it. His speech made the typical gun control argument that firearms increase the rate of violence. That claims is false. The fact is gun control does the opposite of what its proponents claim. By reducing the number of individuals that have ready access to firearms gun control decreases the cost of performing violence and therefore makes violence a more acceptable risk than it otherwise would be.
Keep the politicians out of the circuses less the people be reminded about how bad they’re getting screwed.