"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.