The biggest star of Monday night’s college football national championship game wasn’t victorious Alabama quarterback A.J. McCarron, who threw for 264 yards and 2 touchdowns, in leading the Crimson Tide to a 42-14 shellacking of Notre Dame. Nor was it Alabama’s two-headed rushing attack, made up of Eddie Lacy and T.J. Yeldon, who combined for 248 rushing yards and 3 touchdowns. And it wasn’t Nick Saban, who has now won three national titles in his six seasons as Alabama’s head coach.

No, the biggest star was Katherine Webb, the reigning Miss Alabama USA and McCarron’s girlfriend, who was spotted by an ESPN camera during the first quarter. When Webb appeared on the screen, ESPN announcer Brent Musburger began drooling.

“When you’re a quarterback at Alabama, you see that lovely lady there? She does go to Auburn, I’ll admit that, but she’s also Miss Alabama, and that’s A.J. McCarron’s girlfriend,” Musburger said. “Wow, I’m telling ya, you quarterbacks, you get all the good looking women. What a beautiful woman! Whoa! So if you’re a youngster in Alabama, start getting the football out and throw it around the backyard with pops.”

Musburger’s reaction isn’t puzzling in the beer-wings-and-women culture of college football, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t troubling. There is a culture of domestic violence and sexual assault in football, and one need look no farther than the game Musburger was announcing to find evidence of it. At the NFL level, instances of domestic violence and sexual assault outpace the national average.

Painting Webb as merely a perk of the job, as nothing more than the Alabama beauty queen dating the quarterback of the Crimson Tide, only enables that culture. It’s a culture that views women as nothing more than chattel, a commodity to be won by the best player even if she isn’t a willing participant. It fosters a sense of entitlement to women and their bodies that only ingrains the rape and violence culture deeper into the game. Before the end of the game, for example, an NFL player had already tweeted his phone number to Webb’s account and offered to take her to a strip club.

That sense of entitlement contributes to, if it doesn’t cause, incidents like the Steubenville rape case, the murder of Kasandra Perkins, and the cover-up of a potential sexual assault on Notre Dame’s campus. It contributes to efforts to redefine rape, to block laws like the Violence Against Women Act, and to tell a raped woman that she should have shut that whole thing down. And it’s a sense of entitlement that is only encouraged every time we tell a young boy that enough practice passes in the backyard will get him his beauty queen.

Almost immediately after Kansas City Chiefs lineback Jovan Belcher committed suicide outside the Chiefs’ practice facility — less than an hour after police say he murdered his girlfriend, Kasandra Perkins in their home — discussion turned to the role concussions and brain trauma may have played in the deaths. That isn’t surprising, given that the link between football and long-term brain trauma has sparked a nationwide conversation about the safety of the men who play the game.

That’s an important discussion: protecting the men and boys who play football from long-term brain injuries sustained on the field is imperative. But because the manner in which he killed himself eliminated any chance doctors have of diagnosing chronic traumatic encepholopathy (CTE), concussions, or other brain trauma, we will never know for sure what role concussions played in the tragedy.

What is painfully evident though is that the murder of Kasandra Perkins was a blatant act of domestic violence, and the combination of that murder and Belcher’s ensuing suicide followed a path that is common in our country. And yet, while we seem willing to drift to the easy conversation (about concussions) or the politically charged conversation (about guns), we’re ignoring the painful truths about domestic violence and murder-suicides in American society. By focusing so intently on a conversation with no immediate answers, we’re missing the conversation that is so evident.

“We don’t have all of the details about whether or to what extent he’d been abusive before this, but when you pick up a gun and murder your girlfriend, that’s domestic violence,” Shaina Goodman, the public policy coordinator at the National Network to End Domestic Violence, told me. “This is what domestic violence homicide looks like.”

And sadly, it looks like that all too often. There are 12 murder-suicides a week in this country, according to one study, and most are domestic in nature. Three women a day are killed by intimate partners. 91 percent of domestic murders are committed by men, 88 percent involve a firearm. The most dangerous combination of killer in domestic abuse cases, according to David Adams, co-author of a report on domestic murders, is a “jealous substance abuser with a gun,” and such a combination “was present in about 40 percent of the killers” Adams interviewed for his study.

Is that Jovan Belcher? It’s hard to tell. In college, he punched out a glass window over a woman, according to crime reports from the University of Maine, and police were called to his college home another time over a dispute, though not violent in nature, with a woman. Other news reports have indicated that Belcher and Perkins were at a rocky point in their relationship, that he was visiting another woman he identified as his “girlfriend” to police, and that he exchanged text messages with a friend in which he called Perkins “crazy.” Belcher was a “heavy drinker,” intoxicated the night before the incident, and abused prescription pain medications, according to other reports.

I don’t think any of that proves that Belcher has a history of domestic violence, but according to Adams’ study (also authored by professors Jacquelyn C. Campbell and Richard Gelles), only 25 percent of murder-suicide incidents indicated previous cases of domestic violence in arrest records.

Whether Belcher fits the perfect profile of most men who commit murder-suicide or not, it’s more clear that this is a case of domestic violence than it is that concussions or brain injuries played a role. And this isn’t just about Jovan Belcher and Kasandra Perkins. It’s about all of the men who commit domestic homicides and all of the women who die in them each year in our country.

So while it’s important to continue exploring the link between football and brain injuries and the societal effects those brain injuries can have, using concussions as a catch-all explainer of Belcher and Perkins’ death strikes me as a convenient way to gloss over the tougher-to-handle fact that this may have simply been a case of domestic violence. By using concussions or CTE as such a catch-all, we miss the chance to explore the prevalence of domestic violence in our society and the mores, norms, and gender roles that make that violence so prevalent. We miss the opportunity to examine policies we could enact (like the Violence Against Women Act, which will come in front of Congress again this month) and societal changes we need to make to ensure that domestic violence — and murder-suicide — is less likely to occur in the future.

“Talking only about brain injuries makes it about the individual,” Goodman said. “To respond to this incident as only about mental health problems ignores the systemic, cultural level of domestic violence, the reality of what it looks like, and the serious prevalence of it. In the end, and in addition to whatever other important issues this incident raises, this is a domestic violence issue and it needs to be identified as such.”

Immediately after the suicide of Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher, who police say murdered his girlfriend at their home before driving to the Chiefs’ practice facility and shooting himself in front of the team’s coach and general manager, thoughts turned to the role concussions and brain injuries may have played in the tragedy.

But during halftime of last night’s Sunday Night Football broadcast, NBC’s Bob Costas brought up another angle: the role guns, and our nation’s lax gun laws, played in the tragedy. After a brief introduction, Costas quoted Kansas City-based columnist Jason Whitlock, who wrote yesterday that he believed both Belcher and his girlfriend, Kasandra Perkins, would be alive today were it not for Belcher’s possession of a gun:

‘Our current gun culture,’ Whitlock wrote, ‘ensures that more and more domestic disputes will end in the ultimate tragedy. And 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.’

Conservatives and gun advocates are, of course, angry at Costas’ insinuation, via Whitlock, that gun control could have prevented the murder of Kasandra Perkins. Fox & Friends blasted Costas this morning, with co-host Brian Kilmeade relying on the tried-and-true point that follows every outbreak of gun violence this country has. “I just don’t know if it’s appropriate enough on a Sunday night, less than 24 hours after this guy took his own life and killed his girlfriend and the mother of his baby, to make that stance,” Kilmeade said. “I don’t think we needed to hear that last night.”

When, then, is the appropriate time to talk about gun violence? According to gun advocates, it wasn’t after another black teenager was shot in a parking lot because he was listening to loud music. It wasn’t after another mass murder at one of our schools, shopping malls, or movie theaters. It wasn’t in a year when another 30,000 Americans lost their lives to firearms (11,000 in homicides), or in a country where 1,800 women like Kasandra Perkins are killed in gun disputes and another 5,000 are treated for assault-related gunshot wounds every year. It wasn’t during presidential debates. It wasn’t after Trayvon Martin was killed for wearing a hoodie, after Jared Lee Loughner shot a member of Congress in the head, after the Dark Knight Rises theater shooting, or after the latest murderous weekend in one of our nation’s biggest cities. So if those weren’t the right times, and this isn’t either, when? Which high-profile murder, suicide, or mass killing will be the one that gets us to talk?

Perhaps, if Jovan Belcher didn’t own a gun, he would have found another way to kill Kasandra Perkins and himself. Or perhaps he wouldn’t have. Having a gun in the home, after all, increases both the risk of homicide and suicide, and 60 percent of our nation’s homicides are committed with guns. Studies have shown that guns in the home increase chances of homicide two to three times, and gun death rates are seven times higher in states that have high household gun ownership (Missouri is 21st, and considered a high-ownership state), according to the Brady Campaign. For suicide, guns present a similar problem. “Every study that has examined the issue to date has found that within the U.S., access to firearms is associated with increased suicide risk,” according to Harvard’s School of Public Health, and suicides committed with guns are most likely to be successful.

A domestic dispute in any home may leave a woman bloody and bruised, but in a home without a gun, it’s far less likely to leave her murdered. The presence of a firearm in the home increases the risk of homicide for women by five times, according to one study, and two-thirds of women killed with guns each year die in domestic disputes. When a domestic dispute involves a firearm, it is 12 times more likely to end in homicide. If Jovan Belcher didn’t have a gun, perhaps his mother, who watched her son shoot the mother of his three-month-old daughter, could have helped calmed the fight. If Jovan Belcher didn’t have a gun, perhaps the coaches and executives who watched him put the final bullet through his own head, or the police officers who arrived seconds too late, could have saved his life.

We’ll never know if the lack of a legally-owned gun would have changed the situation and kept both Kasandra Perkins and Jovan Belcher alive. Whitlock believes it would have, and I do too. What we do know is that Saturday morning, a gun made it easier for a man to kill his girlfriend, to take his own life, to leave his three-month-old daughter without her parents. And the Jovan Belcher story happens somewhere in this country every day. Somewhere, today, a man will shoot his girlfriend. A woman will shoot herself. A teenage boy will die at the hand of a firearm. A dispute that could have ended with a punch will instead end with a bullet. If that isn’t enough to make us talk about the role of guns in our society, I don’t know what is.

This post discusses plot points from the November 20 and 27 episodes of Sons of Anarchy.

“You reach an age where you realize that being a man isn’t about respect or strength. It’s about being aware of all the things you touch,” Jax writes to his son in his journal in last night’s episode of Sons of Anarchy. It’s a fantastic mission statement for masculinity. And I think the test for Sons of Anarchy going forward is whether the show thinks Jax is living up to it, or if it’s aware that Jax has reached a point where he’s entirely self-deluding, where even his declaration that “You can’t sit in this chair without being a savage,” is a way of evading the person that he’s truly become. I’m at a point with Sons of Anarchy where I literally could not care less about any of the plot mechanisms, the Irish, the cartels, the CIA, etc., but I think the show’s doing some of the best work it’s ever put on screen with its characters’ emotions, and with the impact of their choices.

First, and most important, I think Sons of Anarchy‘s made important steps this season to make Tara a consistent character, and that means forcing her to reckon with the totality of her life with Jax. “I know why you couldn’t walk away a few months ago. The club’s been your whole life, you couldn’t let it die. i think I fell in love with you even more because of that. You’re a beautiful, loyal man Jax,” she told him in last week’s episode. “You’ve done everything you wanted to do, baby. It’s your turn now. we can move on. And after yesterday, I can’t help but feel like this is some kind of last chance for us.” His deflection is heartbreaking, because what it really means is that he wants Tara to turn the job down, that he may say that he’d be willing to consider a life where his wife is the primary breadwinner away from Charming, but that when that option is genuinely present, he’s not up to the task. But Charming isn’t really enough for Tara, even if it takes Unser to help her realize it. “I love Jax and my boys. I love being his wife…I’m okay with the life,” she tells the old man when she meets him at chemo, stepping back from the triumphant embrace of her role as queen that marked her last season. “Seems like you left yourself off that list,” Unser reminds her. “I used to love being a surgeon,” Tara admits.

When she accepts the job, telling the head of the practice, “It’s a perfect fit. I just want to keep it under wraps. Let Jax sit with it for a minute,” she’s acting in her own interests. But she isn’t ready, either, to face up to the fact that what’s a perfect fit for her and what’s a perfect fit for Jax may be fundamentally incompatible. Jax may promise Tara that “I’m going to give you a beautiful life.” But the two of them, at least in our viewing, have never been able to have an honest conversation about what beautiful means to either of them, to agree on a shared vision of their life. They’re good at impulse, at sex in that hotel room, at the shotgun wedding. But marriage means planning, means understanding how your touch affects things years down the road.

It’s Wendy who speaks that truth to Tara and Jax once she finds out about Abel’s accident, and his kidnapping. “You knock her up, spit out another kid, and throw your entire family against the chaos. And you, how can you live like this? What is wrong with you?” she tells them. And when they object, she doubles down, telling them “Bullshit, you know I’m right.” How Jax punishes her for telling the truth, that as a recovering addict with a partner who is out of the life, Wendy is actually better-equipped to raise Abel than Jax and Tara are, is, to me, one of the most repulsive things that’s happened in this show. Tara may have revitalized prospects of a career, and Jax may be a man. But Wendy loves her son enough not to put him in danger, not to use him as a pawn in manipulating her family. And Jax absolutely cannot handle that truth.

Instead, he decides he’s justified in attacking Wendy as a threat to her family, tells her she’ll use her genuine and legitimate fears for her child to make her seem insane rather than accepting responsibility for his own failures, and attacks her through her sobriety. Wendy is not a perfect person, of course. Her drug use endangered Abel and made his life more difficult. But as an addict, her drug use has a different moral quality than Jax’s sober bad acts. And just as Gemma took advantage of Wendy’s addiction to try to push her into suicide in the pilot, Jax has become someone who will threaten Wendy’s hard-won sobriety to avoid a reconciliation for the threat he himself poses to Abel’s safety. It’s a repulsive thing to do. And I don’t know how Jax can recover from the places he’s gone to. If he’s Hamlet, Jax’s fate may be to suffer a kind of living death, casting a cancerous shade across the people he believes he loves. Whether she knows it or not, Gemma may have seen her son’s future in Nero’s ravaged face.

Clay’s expulsion may offer some instruction. “I’m aware that we don’t just pick it up where we left off. But maybe this is a chance for us to do it different, Gem. No lies, no secrets,” he tells her. Their reconciliation may be false on Gemma’s end, and Clay may not have fully reckoned with his past willingness to commit violence against people he loved in the name of controlling them. But there seems to be some genuine shame and regret in his reactions to her return, to his expulsion from the club. “I’ll sleep at mine tonight. The ink’ll ruin your sheets,” Clay tells her as he heads off to have his tattoos covered up. He’s accepted his punishment from the club, and he’s aware of what he’s touching, even to the level of Gemma’s linens.

If you want to know what it looks like when male artists show solidarity with women and women’s issues, the Dublin hip-hop group Original Rudeboys just provided a great example of it, turning down a chance to open for Chris Brown:

A member of the group Sean Walsh said: ‘Even though it’s a huge opportunity to play in the O2 with a major hip hop star and a substantial fee was offered, we are completely against Chris Brown’s assault on Rihanna.’

The group also claimed they didn’t want to mislead their own fans as their latest single ‘Blue Eyes’ is about domestic violence.

Sean said: ‘In addition, with our latest single ‘Blue Eyes’ being about domestic violence it goes against everything we are about as a band and supporting Chris would send out the wrong message to our fans.’

It’s one thing to talk the talk, and another to take an actual financial and long-term growth hit in order to stay consistent with what you believe—or, like John Scalzi, to spend actual time and energy arguing the good fight instead of simply saying the right thing when you’re asked and it’s convenient to do so. I hope this comes back for them in all the best ways. And while it’s a little hard to track down good streaming audio of their stuff, I’d be up for hearing more of this:

On a related note, the argument’s been made, I think effectively, that some of the reaction to Chris Brown has been racialized, making a black man a scapegoat for domestic violence while famous white men with even worse records get to continue on their way. I do think that there’s an extent to which Brown appears to be trolling people who are dismayed by his behavior, since disapprobation seems to have hardened support among his core fans, as is the case with his decision to dress up as a jihadi stereotype for Halloween.

But I do think that there are racial differences between the response to Brown and the response to white men of a certain profitability behaving badly. And I can’t think of a better example of that than how quickly a silence descended around FX’s decision to work with Charlie Sheen, and to stay in business with him after the first ten episodes of Anger Management, and the fact that when the news came down yesterday that Fox had struck a deal to syndicate the sitcom on nine affiliate stations, that it went relatively uncommented upon. I’d like to think that the news that more Fox divisions are getting into business with a guy with a long record of violence against women is news. And if equality is what we’re after, I’d like to see the same kind of pressure on Sheen to behave constructively and respectfully towards women if he wants public approbation that’s being applied to Brown.