Football player murder-suicide, traumatic brain injury and gun culture

The tragedy is undeniable. Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher fatally shot his girlfriend, Kasandra Perkins, Saturday morning in front of his own mother while the couple’s three-month old daughter slept in another room. Belcher  then drove to Arrowhead Stadium, where, after thanking his coach and general manager  for giving him a chance to play in the NFL, he shot himself to death, as the two men looked on.

Ultimately, we’ll never know what Belcher was thinking or feeling when he killed his girlfriend and then himself. The couple had been arguing but we don’t know about what. What we do know, though, is that neither internal problems in the couple’s relationship nor Belcher’s internal psychology can explain the horrific events, but rather the twin tragedies of traumatic brain injury and gun availability.

Derek Flood in the Huffington Post and Rick Morrissey at the Chicago Sun Times both look at traumatic brain injury, often sustained by football players and other athletes, as the potential cause of the Belcher’s seemingly inexplicable behavior. Morrissey writes that “Insanity is the only explanation I have right now for the tragedy that occurred in Kansas City, Mo., on Saturday morning…. There’s not enough information out yet, but nothing else fits beyond mental illness or brain injury or some combination of the two.” Flood points out that Belcher didn’t fit the profile of a domestic abuser.

Belcher graduated with a degree in child development and family relations from the University of Maine. While at Maine Belcher joined the anti-violence group Male Athletes Against Violence. As a member of MAAV, Belcher would have signed a pledge which included these lines:

I pledge:

  • to educate myself on issues surrounding violence while developing personal beliefs against the use of violence
  • to be a positive role model for my community
  • to look honestly at my actions in regard to violence and make changes if necessary
Flood also points out that those who knew Belcher were shocked by his behavior. Belcher’s former University of Maine football coach Jack Cosgrove  said, “I’m hard-pressed to find or recall a young man who had more of an impact in a positive way on his teammates and his football family in my time here. He’s truly one of the great stories in the program’s history.” And Belcher’s former High School coach Ron Langella said, “He was a good athlete, but an even better person. An unbelievable role model.”

Both Flood and Morrissey implore us to look at traumatic brain injury and what we should do about it. Flood urges, “we should be hesitant to write this off as a case of “one bad apple,” avoiding the larger conversation we need to have. When it comes to sports and TBI, perhaps it’s time we asked ourselves some tough questions about how much are we willing to sacrifice for our entertainment.” And Morrissey asks, “when are we going to reach the point when we seriously ask ourselves whether the game of football is worth it? Not as an academic question but in a practical way of asking how many lives we’re willing to sacrifice to a game.”

And as Flood points out,

The combination of traumatic brain injury, alcohol, and handguns make for a deadly combination that not only may be behind Belcher’s murder-suicide, but has also been linked to an alarming trend of suicides and violent crime among soldiers returning from combat. Again, we find the same scenario: Good kids who suddenly “crack” and become violent.

And when it comes to the role of gun culture, nobody said it better than Bob Costas, during Sunday’s half time and Jason Whitlock, the sports journalist he cited in his speech.

Transcript after the jump.

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. 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.

“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.”

nyc

Born and raised on the mean streets of New York City’s Upper West Side, Katie Halper is a comic, writer, blogger, satirist and filmmaker based in New York. Katie graduated from The Dalton School (where she teaches history) and Wesleyan University (where she learned that labels are for jars.) A director of Living Liberally and co-founder/performer in Laughing Liberally, Katie has performed at Town Hall, Symphony Space, The Culture Project, D.C. Comedy Festival, all five Netroots Nations, and The Nation Magazine Cruise, where she made Howard Dean laugh! and has appeared with Lizz Winstead, Markos Moulitsas, The Yes Men, Cynthia Nixon and Jim Hightower. Her writing and videos have appeared in The New York Times, Comedy Central, The Nation Magazine, Gawker, Nerve, Jezebel, the Huffington Post, Alternet and Katie has been featured in/on NY Magazine, LA Times, In These Times, Gawker,Jezebel, MSNBC, Air America, GritTV, the Alan Colmes Show, Sirius radio (which hung up on her once) and the National Review, which called Katie “cute and some what brainy.” Katie co-produced Tim Robbins’s film Embedded, (Venice Film Festival, Sundance Channel); Estela Bravo’s Free to Fly (Havana Film Festival, LA Latino Film Festival); was outreach director for The Take, Naomi Klein/Avi Lewis documentary about Argentine workers (Toronto & Venice Film Festivals, Film Forum); co-directed New Yorkers Remember the Spanish Civil War, a video for Museum of the City of NY exhibit, and wrote/directed viral satiric videos including Jews/ Women/ Gays for McCain.

Katie is a writer, comedian, filmmaker, and New Yorker.

Read more about Katie

Join the Conversation