Fox Sports writer Jason Whit[less]lock was the fool quote by Bob Costas in his smug little commentary during a halftime on Sunday.
In an TV interview, Nit Whit had this to say [via Tim Graham and Jeff Goldstein]:
Sports gets so much attention, and people tune out the real world, that I try to take advantage of the opportunity to talk about the real world when sports lends itself to that and try to open people’s eyes. You know, I did not go as far as I’d like to go because my thoughts on the NRA and America’s gun culture – I believe the NRA is the new KKK. And that the arming of so many black youths, uh, and loading up our community with drugs, and then just having an open shooting gallery, is the work of people who obviously don’t have our best interests [at heart].
I think it’s obvious if you’ve traveled abroad, and traveled to countries where they have legitimate gun laws, that we don’t have to have what we have in America, where people somehow think a gun enhances their liberty, and that people somehow think a gun makes them safer. It just doesn’t. A gun turns some kids listening to music into a murder scene. And uh, you know, if you don’t have a gun, you drive home. You know, kids listening to some loud music, you don’t like it, you go home and complain to your wife. But when you have a gun, you open fire, potentially, and take the life of a child.
Jeff has published a very informative post on this whole subject, which includes a long quote from Stefan B. Tahmassebi that appeared in the George Mason Civil Rights Law Journal in 1991. A highlight from it:
The history of gun control in America possesses an ugly component: discrimination and oppression of blacks, other racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants, and other “unwanted elements,” including union organizers and agrarian reformers. Firearms laws were often enacted to disarm and facilitate repressive action against these groups.
The first gun control laws were enacted in the ante-bellum South forbidding blacks, whether free or slave, to possess arms, in order to maintain blacks in their servile status. After the Civil War, the South continued to pass restrictive firearms laws in order to deprive the newly freed blacks from exercising their rights of citizenship. During the later part of the 19th century and the early part of the 20th century, gun control laws were passed in the South in order to disarm agrarian reformers and in the North to disarm union organizers. In the North, a strong xenophobic reaction to recent waves of immigrants added further fuel for gun control laws which were used to disarm such persons. Other firearms ownership restrictions were adopted in order to repress the incipient black civil rights movement.
Another old American prejudice supported such gun control efforts, then as it does now: the idea that poor people, and especially the black poor, are not to be trusted with firearms. Even now, in many jurisdictions in which police departments have wide discretion in issuing firearm permits, the effect is that permits are rarely issued to poor or minority citizens.
The rest of the quote is well-worth a read, as are Jeff’s perceptive comments afterwards.
A highlight:
…That Whitlock conflates the NRA’s desire to keep men free and protected with the consequences of bad actors who kill using fire arms, is yet more proof that the victim culture — the culture of passing the responsibility off on some historical actor or some white-faced Devil who holds the wrong political views — is what is truly responsible for the plantation mentality of so many liberal blacks. Here’s my advice, unwanted, because it comes from a white man’s mouth: accept personal responsibility and stop looking for scapegoats. Sure, it will force you to look critically at yourself — which is far more difficult than merely lashing out at all the straw devils that people your fevered, tiny brain — but in the end, it is truly liberating, and it will put you in touch with those in this country who, despite your rank uselessness and your constant attempts to demonize them, nevertheless continue to protect your rights as well as their own.
It’s called being a fucking grown up.
Whitless Nitwit is to busy feeling smug and superior to care. Besides, because he’s black, his bosses will protect him and let him remain immature, so he has no incentive to grow-up and be a man. Kind of like a certain jug-eared nancy boy of our acquaintance, eh?
Frequent Protein Wisdom commentator palaeomerus left a Righteous Rant in the Comments section that is worth quoting in full [vulgarity ahead — but it's justified]:
Jason, I can’t help but notice, that to the new performing imbecile clowns in the press, almost everything is “the new Taliban”, “the new Nazi’s”, “the new rich fraternity party cruising rape gang”, “the new child molestation ring”, or “the new KKK”.
You overpaid hot house flowers don’t have the stones to fuck with the real KKK diminished as it is.
You don’t have the stones to fuck with four kids on a street corner whether they have guns or not. You lack the balls .
You routinely go after non confrontational, law abiding people, as a substitute, for finding in your fat twisted hearts, the necessary outrage to condemn an actual vicious thuggish criminal murderer who just blew away the mother of his child in front of her own mother, went to a stadium to bother his coach one last time (which you dolts tried to pass off as kind of classy) and then shot himself.
The problem wasn’t the gun Jason. Lots of people use guns responsibly because they aren’t idiots like you and other the paranoid gun-phobic pussies and cynical political hacks, who think a piece of polymer and steel is a little demon that drives people mad and kills them by itself.
The big problem was that your precious little football player was a violent, piece of shit,. He was a dangerous, over indulged, asshole, and a man-child who should have been locked up or living under close supervision. The people around him KNEW he was a time bomb. They saw the signs. They did nothing.
But there are some little problems too. They didn’t cause the event, but they helped to exacerbate it and facilitated it to a certain extent. Can you guess what the little problems were?
The little problems were the NFL and sports writing chumps like YOU, stupidly propping this fucking lunatic up as a hero and a good guy AFTER he did what he did, you spineless pieces of shit.
The little problems were every single one of the vapid, morally confused, delusional assholes who tried to blame head injuries, drugs, society, race, and a gun, for the actions of the kind of sick piece of shit, who willingly would hurt or kill his own family over a potential breakup, because in his dim, bully-thug mind they were NOTHING but a form of chattel property that had no right to live if they chose to leave his violent, always angry, out of control, ass.
You dumb shits even did this when Chris Bennoit killed his own wife and child. You blamed ‘roids for it.
The whole sports reporting culture is sick. You portray these pitiful, mentally crippled, unstable, inarticulate “jocks” demigods and glorify them even when you know that they should not be let alone with anybody smaller than them who is not armed. Even when they prove to be frauds and con-men. Even when they spread hateful rhetoric. Even when they get hooked on drugs or spend themselves into bankruptcy, or quit to run a pot clinic in Japan. You portray them as beyond shame, above standards of adult conduct, accountable only for performance in a competition and how they are marketed.
And I doubt a rich NFL player would let a law about hand guns keep him from getting a hand gun anyway. He sure didn’t follow the laws against murder did he?
If I had a son or daughter I would not let them watch or listen to you dim witted sports reporter stooges making fools of themselves day after day. You aren’t worthy of public attention.
Fuck you. Fuck your articles. Fuck your networks and feature syndicates. Fuck your bullshit careers. Fuck your mouth breathing fans. And most of all, fuck the bully pulpit you jack-offs do not come close to deserving. You can’t even understand life well enough to condemn a man who just killed the mother of his child and himself.
Dead solid perfect.
In a follow-up comment, he writes:
You sports press guys loved this murderer and yet you hated Tim Tebow. Think about that for a minute Jason Whitlock, you soulless empty suit, with stars in his eyes for a murder just because he had a sports uniform.
Take heart, palaeo: Whitlock is disabled in that he has a big hole in his soul. You know, deep down, he is one miserable fuck.
