NBC's Bob Costas Interrupts Sunday Night Football With Gun Control Lecture

"Handguns do not enhance our safety"

UPDATES:

Jason Whitlock, the columnist who inspired Costas' gun control lecture, has now claimed that the "NRA is the new KKK." Read about it here.

Fellow sportscaster Jim Gray also offered an endorsement of Costas' comments during a Monday appearance on Fox. See what he had to add about gun control -- and also how fast he backtracked -- here.

NBC Sportscaster Bob Costas took a detour from his usual discussion of athletics during Sunday Night Football to lecture his audience on gun control.

Discussing the shocking murder-suicide that rocked the NFL over the weekend, when Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher fatally shot his girlfriend and then committed suicide in front of his coach and general manager, Costas argued that domestic disputes are more likely to end in such a fashion if the government does not limit people's access to firearms.

Costas said:

Writer Jason Whitlock, with whom I do not always agree but 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.

Here's the video, via MRC-TV:

Twitchy captured the flabbergasted and impatient tweets of viewers:

(Photo: Twitchy)