Steve McNair apparently died not at the hands of his mistress in a murder-suicide but at the hands of the “gun culture” of America.  So decides sports writer Mike Lupica in the New York Daily News, who must have leapt to his typewriter within minutes of the wire services announcing McNair’s death in order to indict millions of Americans who don’t kill people but manage to own firearms responsibly.  In doing so, he martyrs a man who clearly had other issues than the national “gun culture”:

He came from the Friday night lights of John Brewer Field to being the kind of football star and sports celebrity he became in Nashville. Now he dies in a Nashville condominium with a 20-year-old woman not his wife, multiple gunshot wounds, one to the head, the young woman dead there next to him.

The gun was found next to the woman, Sahel Kazemi. Where did the gun come from? Where it always comes from: Somewhere.

Once I asked one of McNair’s high school coaches, a man named Madison Magee, what the next biggest thing was to happen in Mount Olive after Steve McNair and the man said, “Nothin’.”

He bought a big spread for his mother there, a 600-acre ranch, made millions playing pro football, even if he had to quit younger than a lot of other quarterbacks because he was just too beat up, like a fighter who took too many punches. Even after he stopped playing he was a big guy in Nashville. This weekend he was famous again, this time as a crime statistic, homicide victim, dead by gun. …

There were so many wonderful statistics attached to McNair’s career, the most important being the one Super Bowl, the four Pro Bowls to which he was selected, all the games he won. But the last was the only one that mattered. He is the 36th homicide victim in Nashville this year. That is down from 41 at the same time last year.

Only in a country of gun lovers is that considered progress.

Only a sportswriter with the arrogance and vapidity of Lupica would assume that anyone would equate murder with progress.  Nice strawman you got there, Mike.  Ever do any real arguing, or do you prefer to make up the other half of the debate on your own in order to win debates?

For the record, the murder of a boyfriend, as this appears to be, is slightly more likely to happen by knife instead of gun.  Statistics from the DoJ on murders of intimates from 1990-2005 show that 47% of murdered boyfriends get stabbed to death, while 45% of them get killed by guns.  Would Lupica attribute that to a “knife culture”?  Would the plurality of knife murders be “progress” for Lupica?

Had Lupica paused long enough to do some actual research, he would have found that murders of intimates have dropped over the last 30 years, and that the use of guns as the weapons had declined even faster than the overall drop:

But why let facts get in the way of accusing every gun owner in America of McNair’s murder?

Steve McNair didn’t deserve to get murdered.  However, McNair put himself in a relationship with a woman other than his wife, who at least from the fact that the Nashville police “weren’t looking for a suspect” appears to have killed him as a result of their relationship.  Maybe the lesson here isn’t that America has an evil gun culture, but that famous athletes (and plenty of other people) live risky lifestyles and should pick their companions with a lot more care than some do.