The issue for many is a clear-cut case of abuse while others seem to hope it was a one-time incident. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodall told CBS Morning News he wasn’t sure of all the facts until he saw the video. A Wall Street Journal report said, “Goodell backed off his investigation … after hearing Palmer’s side of the story. Reportedly, she told the commissioner that she had hit Rice and felt partially responsible.”

While the FBI and NFL investigate, Rice has made a public apology. Ray Rice’s contract with the Baltimore Ravens on September 8, 2014, following the release of an additional video of the incident was suspended. Rice successfully appealed his indefinite suspension by the NFL in federal court. “The legal victory has done little to pave the way toward a return to the playing field — Rice is still an unsigned free agent,” notes Todd William, founder and CEO of Reputation Rhino, an online public relations company in New York City.

As a shocked public views the elevator scene, there are radio and television commentators saying that Rice, not his wife, is the real victim here.

WHAT?!

Slate.com reported Fox’s Tamara Holder as saying “I think it’s interesting …that the police are coming out … and not paying attention to the fact that there is a family here …That there were decisions to be made behind closed doors. That also … Miss Palmer … played a role in it.”

Oh pullease.

Slate.com also reported that A.J. Delgado, a National Review writer said on a radio show: “Some might even say, watching that video, that Ray Rice is the bigger victim of domestic violence here.”

The National Family Violence Survey (NFVS) found nearly equal rates of assault between men and women but warns “Collecting various types of counts from men and women does not yield an accurate understanding of battering and serious injury occurring from intimate partner violence.” Focusing on the strict number of pushes and swats “does not measure control, coercion, or the motives for conflict tactics; it also leaves out sexual assault and violence by ex-spouses or partners and does not determine who initiated the violence.”

On a recent episode of Slate’s The Gist, former prosecutor noted, “Many victims of domestic violence use violence against their abuser to either fight back, retaliate, protect themselves, sometimes in anticipation of violence when they know what’s coming because of a certain look … They immediately start getting into a defensive mode and actually use violence themselves.”

Many sports stars have been in the spotlight for spousal abuse, but many of the punishments imposed by the court have been light. “The increased attention to domestic violence by the media and increased awareness about the issue generally is likely to lead to increased punishments,” notes Eric Gonchar, a well-known New York attorney.

For instance, the Phillies’ Brett Myers pitched in Boston shortly after being charged with assaulting his wife. The charges were dropped. The New York Times quoted Ruth Glenn, the interim executive director of the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence as saying, “The … leagues had better be paying attention. They need to demonstrate to society that there is zero tolerance against domestic violence. Changing culture takes a while. But you have to start somewhere.”

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I never fired a gun in my life. Or even held one. Yet I’ve had a long affair with guns since they forced their attentions on me back in 1980. On April 22nd—celebrated everywhere then and now as Earth Day—a terrorist, armed with three guns and multiple rounds of ammunition, invaded my daughter Sheryl’s California home. He was not an Islamist extremist or White-Supremacy racist or schizophrenic. Just your ordinary, polite “nice guy” psychopath bent on cancelling a debt. He was, in fact, a “good friend” of Sheryl’s husband, who managed to survive the near-fatal wounds from his friend’s guns. But Sheryl did not survive. Trying to escape through the nearest door with her nine-month old baby in her arms, she was shot multiple times, even as she lay on the floor. She was pronounced dead at the scene. She was 28 years old. Her baby, wounded in the wrist, was found crawling in her blood.

The murderer was arrested the next day. A few months after Sheryl’s murder, my affair with guns became intense—I decided to become an active member of Handgun Control, Inc., (currently known as the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence.) A huge mistake, I was told by the Los Angeles deputy DA getting ready to try the murderer, “If your son-in-law had a gun, your daughter might still be here.” He knew my son-in-law had invited his “friend” into his home. Pretty hard to be first on the draw when you’re not expecting to play “High Noon” at the old corral—in your own home.

Many months later, the Deputy D. A., in a jury case, obtained a conviction on all counts. When I thanked him for his excellent prosecution of the case, he was gracious, until he popped his question: “You still working for Handgun Control?” When I nodded, he repeated his National Rifle Association mantra: “If your son-in-law had a gun, your daughter might be alive today.” Then he went further…with a sudden offer to give me my daughter’s crime scene and autopsy pictures. “No, thank you,” I murmured, stunned. Only later did I realize that the deputy D.A. was trying to punish me for my activity in Handgun Control!

More than just a gun aficionado, our deputy D. A. was an extremist, willing to shed all traces of decency. Almost three decades later, another deputy D. A. apologized to me on behalf of the Los Angeles district attorney’s office for their colleague’s heartless and against-all-their-rules behavior. His NRA-fueled fantasy that Sheryl’s husband, if armed, could have prevented her death also defied common sense. I was to learn this firsthand, 11 years later, “up close and personal” from a double murder which took place on my Long Island street.

On Christmas Eve 1991, while my neighbors’ daughter was fleeing from her dangerous boyfriend to cousins in the Bronx, her dad, knowing that the rifle-toting stalker would come looking for her in his house, sat braced in his kitchen ready for him, his gun cocked. A retired court officer, the dad knew his way around firearms. But the boyfriend, breaking down the door, landed the first fatal shot. And the second, killing his girlfriend’s brother, also a court officer, armed and well-practiced. “High Noon” in Valley Stream—with a tragic ending.

Fast forward to 2012: you hear the same-genre gun enthusiasts comment:” If we had been allowed to carry guns into that movie house in Aurora, we could have nipped it in the bud.” Yeah, right—through the dark, the haze of the tear gas, the commotion, the killer’s 100-bullet magazine. These “Navy Seal Sharpshooter could-have-beens” repeat their boast after every mass shooting: “I could have stopped it. Gotten that guy” at the Sikk Temple. Or on the Virginia Tech campus. Or on the Long Island Railroad. Or at Columbine. And on and on. At every massacre to come, you will be hearing them repeat the same fantasy-fueled NRA mantra.

And so, we ask them: if carrying a gun saves us from the bad guys, what happened in the Gabby Gifford shooting? Arizona is a right-to-carry-a-concealed-weapon state.

When U. S. Representative Gabrielle Gifford was holding a constituent meeting called “Congress on Your Corner” at a supermarket near Tucson on January 8, 2011, many people in the crowd had guns. Including Gaby herself. But when the crazed assassin opened fire with his 33-magazine semi-automatic rifle, no gunslinger could or would bring him down. One of the bystanders said that he thought about using his weapon, but knew that most people around him and in cars nearby probably had guns as well and if he pulled his out, they would mistake him as a second shooter and take his life. So he did nothing. It was left to the bystanders sans guns to force the killer to the ground.

A few times during my decades-long affair with guns, I actually took heart. There were hopeful signs: Ex-President Ronald Reagan’s eventual support of background checks and bans on assault guns—ten years after a lunatic’s bullet almost killed him in 1981. The 1994 ban on assault weapons was passed by Congress and the Million Moms March against guns took place in 2000. I became discouraged when the ten-year ban on assault weapons was allowed to expire in 2004 and the Million Moms March soon petered down to a pitifully few hundred.

During these past three decades the NRA has been busier than ever with their affair with guns, spending billions to lobby politicians to brainwash the public into thinking that carrying a gun makes us safer.  Convincing too many of us that restricting gun use anywhere—even in church or on campus—is the psychological equivalent of government-imposed castration.

Since the 2000 campaign when Al Gore lost his own state to the gunslingers, no presidential candidate has dared to honestly address the issue of gun control during a campaign. Too dangerous.

Since my daughter’s murder in 1980, there have been almost a million gun deaths in the U. S. Multiply that by ten to count the survivors—the families and friends whose lives have been devastated by these tragedies. As you can see, my affair with guns has not gone well, not well at all.

Ellen Zelda Kessner is a freelance writer whose articles have been published in Redbook, Newsday, The New York Times, The Miami Herald, Good Housekeeping, Cosmopolitan and Woman’s Day. She is the author of the memoir, After the Violence: Seeking My Daughter, Myself and the Child She Left Behind.

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