A favorite American pastime of the mainstream media is to hold guns responsible anytime a person is shot dead.

Predictably, former NFL star Steve McNair’s death was no exception.

The NY Daily News’s Mike Lupica writes of McNair’s death:

McNair’s life and his career were all about the possibilities of sports and the country. He showed everybody that you could come from Mount Olive and a small college and if you had the talent and character and even heart, you had the same equal opportunities as anybody else.

Now McNair dies the way he dies and shows you that a gun in the wrong hand is still the greatest equalizer of all.

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.

The death of McNair is tragic to be sure. However, to assume he would be alive if only guns were outlawed is flawed reasoning.

If someone wants you dead bad enough that they’re willing to shoot you and then themselves you had better sleep with one eye open.

They’ll use a knife if they can’t get a gun, and if they can’t get a knife they’ll use poison.

It’s too early to know for sure what happened with McNair, but what we do know is that a gun didn’t sneak into his house and shoot him.

The old saying, “guns don’t kill people, people kill people” is over used to be sure, but it’s nevertheless true.

Ed Morrissey over at Hot Air makes another good point on this:

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”?

The bottom line here is that Steve McNair’s death is very sad indeed. He was an amazing athlete and good person by all accounts.

By contrast, Mike Lupica is an asshat.