Bob Costas struggles to find a proper place for himself.

He made a "mistake"... blah blah... no! He said something out of line with the beliefs of the people who watch TV football and thereby offended management. Here's some of the icky blather that leaked out:

“There are reasonable disagreements, and I respect that. But then there are things that come from every angle, where you just have to say to yourself ‘sometimes the quality of the thinking of those who oppose you speaks for itself.’ I was told — I didn’t see it — that someone compared this as a fire-able offense to situations in which people have made blatantly racist comments, or comments that had no place whatsoever....” 

Wow. Some pressure was exerted. Come on. It was bad, but it wasn't that bad.

"Jovan Belcher’s grieving teammates on the Kansas City Chiefs refused to blame guns for his horrifying murder-suicide."

So begins an article at The Daily News. Interesting construction "his... murder-suicide." Normally, when you say "his murder," the possessive pronoun refers to the murder victim, not the murder." "[H]is horrifying murder-suicide" seems to strain to hide Belcher's agency in killing 2 human beings. One senses that The Daily News would like to do the very thing the teammates aren't doing: blame the guns.

"If you have daughters, you should (have a gun),” Chiefs defensive lineman Shaun Smith said Monday. “You have to protect yourself. You work so hard to get to where you at, I'll be damned if I’ll just let someone take it from me.”

If you acquire wealth, you become a theft target!

Linebacker Brandon Siler, who had Thanksgiving dinner with Belcher, also had no problems with guns.

“Well, a majority of people own one, especially in the places where they're legal. Most of the time they're for self defense or sport,” he said.

Speaking of self-defense and looking at the picture at the link, showing the huge size difference between Belcher and the woman he killed, even if your concern is domestic violence, why would you blame guns? There are any number of ways he could have killed her. A gun would have been the one way she could have defended herself.

And, by the way, I'm not swallowing the story that Belcher traveled from the murder scene — his home — to the football facility for the purpose of thanking his employers for giving him "a chance" in life. That's management's story, and it works as PR. It essentially requests that we sympathize with the murderer. I invite you into a thought experiment: Why else might Belcher have relocated?

With a theory of my own, I asked Meade that question yesterday, and he said something that hadn't occurred to me. Belcher shot his Kasandra Perkins in front of his mother. He had an audience. And he sought out an audience —  head coach Romeo Crennel and general manager Scott Pioli — for the suicide. He chose spectators for his self-killing. Having horrified his mother, he went for new spectator-victims, individuals most likely to suffer to see him die. If he thanked them, he was saying you've invested your work and your trust in me and now watch me destroy that.

My theory was different. After the murder, Belcher thought: What do I do now? How can I get out of this? He went to management in the hope that they could bail him out somehow. He was in a terrible jam. Come on, enfold me, protect me. You've got all those ingenious defensive plays on the field, do something for me now. Protect your investment in me. You've done so much for me already. You've given me a chance in life, and a chance is what I really need now. You pulled me up out of nothing. If anyone can help me now it's you.

Want to hear Bob Costas scold America about our terrible, terrible guns?

Here's the video from last night's NBC football broadcast. 

Well, 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.

Here's my perspective: A man committed murder and then murdered himself. But no, the perspective we're supposed to achieve is about how it's the gun that did it. Costas proceeds to read from a column by sportswriter Jason Whitlock, which I recommend reading in full. Here are my — not Costas's — extracts from that column:

A 25-year-old kid gunned down his 22-year-old girlfriend in front of his mother and three-month-old child, and all he could think to do in the immediate aftermath is rush to thank his football coach and football employer....

Kid?  A 25-year-old kid? Why are we infantalizing the adults who play sports? A man committed a vicious murder. All he could think to do? As if he were mentally deficient! When I first read this, it struck me as racist, but now I see that Whitlock himself is black. Perhaps that allows him to feel free to talk about the dead murderer as if he were a child.

... Twenty-eight hours after one of their best friends killed the mother of his child and himself, Chiefs players will take the field and play a violent game.

Their best friend transformed himself into a dead murderer. They should grind their lives to a halt in his memory? A violent game? A man kills 2 human beings and they should respond by feeling squeamish about the violence of the sport? They should equate play violence to real violence? No. I'd say it's an occasion for drawing a sharp line between a game — a game with rules, played voluntarily — and the most evil transgression.

You may argue that we all grieve differently. You may argue that playing the game is the best way to move on and heal....

Heal? Grieve? It was murder. Displays of sympathy for the murderer are inappropriate. To play the game was to deny the murderer any more power than he seized for himself. Put him at a distance. He is not you. 

I would argue that your rationalizations speak to how numb we are in this society to gun violence and murder. We’ve come to accept our insanity. We’d prefer to avoid seriously reflecting upon the absurdity of the prevailing notion that the second amendment somehow enhances our liberty rather than threatens it.

We're numb unless we react to one man's transgressions by relinquishing our attachment to traditional liberty? What other constitutional rights should we give up to prove our sensitivity to a transgressor's act of violence? Throw out free speech, because look at those riots over there? Freedom from search and seizure — that can't be worth it, now, numbsters, can it?

That is the message I wish Chiefs players, professional athletes and all of us would focus on Sunday and moving forward. 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.

But we won’t. We’ll watch Sunday’s game and comfort ourselves with the false belief we’re incapable of the wickedness that exploded inside Jovan Belcher Saturday morning.

Belcher was a murderer, responsible for what he did. To say otherwise is infantalizing, dehumanizing. There's not some outside force "wickedness" — unless you believe in The Devil! — that possesses a man and "explodes." How do you know that one day, that might not happen to you? In Whitlock's view, we're blind and complacent if we don't see that potential. We might just go nuts one day and if there are any weapons around, that random explosion will lead to death. Better ban the guns.