NRA: Jovan Belcher’s Girlfriend Would Be Alive If She Had A Gun. Well, They Had 8.

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National Rifle Association (NRA) CEO Wayne LaPierre claims that Jovan Belcher‘s girlfriend, Kasandra Perkins, would be alive today if she only had had her own gun. LaPierre is dead wrong: there were eight guns in the Belcher-Perkins house. So much for NRA bull.

“The one thing missing in that equation is that woman owning a gun so she could have saved her life from that murderer,” LaPierre told USA TODAY Sports, talking about Kasandra Perkins and Jovan Belcher.

Belcher, of course, is the Kansas City Chiefs linebacker who shot to death Kasandra Perkins, who was just 22-years old, Saturday, December 1, then shot himself to death minutes later.

The couple had a three-month old infant.

“Owning guns is a mainstream part of American culture and it’s growing every day. My God, there’s nothing more mainstream in this country than 100 million Americans who own firearms,” LaPierre says.

Which is utterly pathetic.

Guns shouldn’t be considered part of “culture.” Guns are designed to do one thing, one thing only, and to do it very well: kill. If LaPierre wants to promote guns as “culture,” he’s promoting a gun culture, which is equivalent to a culture of death. So much for the “pro-life” radical right, which isn’t truly pro-life, but pro-birth. And the moment a child is out of the womb, they’re on their own. Like three-month old Zoey Michelle, Kasandra Perkins’ daughter who will now be raised by her grandmother.

“According to Kansas City police, Belcher owned multiple guns, and they were in the house,” USA TODAY reports. “In addition, Sports Illustrated has reported that Perkins went to shooting ranges with Belcher.”

Jack Dickey at Deadspin writes, “Jovan Belcher and Kasandra Perkins kept ‘about eight guns’ in their house and liked to go shooting together, according to a new report from Sports Illustrated.”

So, Wayne LaPierre and the NRA are full of it.

“The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence reminds us that since 1968, when Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated, over one million people have been killed with guns in the United States,” Daniel Kaufmann at the Brookings Institution, one of the most-respected think tanks in the world, reports. “On average, almost 100,000 people in the United States are shot or killed with a gun annually.”

Noting that “there appears to be substantial evidence that removing guns saves lives,” Kaufmann writes that the Brady Campaign “indicates that 94 percent of gun-related suicides would not occur had no guns been present. Since keeping a firearm at home increases the risk of homicide by a factor of three, it is not surprising that guns are more likely to raise the risk of injury than to confer protection. In fact, they claim that every year there are only about 200 legally justified self-defense homicides by private citizens.”

Kaufmann’s article, written just after the Aurora, Colorado, massacre in July at the midnight premiere of “The Dark Night,” addresses all those arguments gun advocates like to try to use to derail the only sane argument: guns kill.

Making Wayne LaPierre even more full of it.

And he’s using the murder-suicide of a popular sports figure to advance a falsehood.

Disgusting.

“So here are some statistics,” Amy Davidson at the New Yorker writes. “According to the Justice Department’s National Institute of Justice, ‘The data are clear: More incidents of murder-suicide occur with guns than with any other weapon. … In 591 murder-suicides, 92 percent were committed with a gun. States with less restrictive gun control laws have as much as eight times the rate of murder-suicides as those with the most restrictive gun control laws.’ Another study found that the mere presence of a gun in the house increased the chance that domestic violence would escalate to murder six fold’.”

But at least some NFL players have learned from this tragic event.

“At least seven NFL players have turned their guns into their respective team’s security following the murder-suicide involving Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher earlier this month, Sports Illustrated’s Peter King reported on ‘Football Night in America’ on Sunday,” ESPN reports.

According to the report, at least one player handed over multiple firearms, telling his team’s personnel that he didn’t trust himself with the guns.

Yeah.

Pretty sure football is far more mainstream than guns.

Let’s see LaPierre, and the NRA, fight that.

 

Via: Doktor Zoom at Wonkette

Image composed from Wikimedia Commons