Piecing together Belcher shooting tragedy

>> hours sleeping in his car outside the houm of another woman. the kansas city police department released video of him sleeping and whether there's a glimpse of him before he took the life of the mother of their 3-year-old girl before taking his own. there was no hint of trouble to come. this afternoon, the kansas city chiefs will try to cope with the stew side of their linebacker turning back to football. it's what they did last week after belcher returned home, argued with perkins and his own mother and daughter in the house, shot perkins nine times, called 911. on wednesday, officials released tape of the call where she's heard trying to save perkins life.

>> we are on the way. we have been on the way the whole time.

>> how hold is the patient. 22.

>> a male or female?

>> female.

>> is she breathing.

>> please hurry. they were arguing.

>> she's been shot?

>> yes.

>> okay. right now, is she awake?

>> the ambulance is on the way, you hear me? you hear me? cassandra? stay with me.

>> belcher drove to the practice facility and put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. the chiefs were aware of issues between them and provided couple counseling. no one flagged behavior that needed to be addressed. a week before the shooting, belcher appears carefree reminiscing about what he loved about thanksgiving as a kid.

>> smelling the great food. mom and grandma's cooking u. you jump up to go see and they tell you it's not ready yet.

>> he mocked perkins and the chiefs. belcher replies, our offense can't even put seven on the board. baby momma crazy, but i have a little girl almost 3 months. she makes me smile on the worst day. suggested belcher would need a gun to ward off his daughter's future boyfriends. i have guns for her little bfs. between the text messages and the shooting itself, we have no answer why he did what he did. we might not ever get one. right now, i want to bring in mike, sports correspondent for public radio , steven who was shot in the aurora community center this summer, and dave, the author of columbine." dave, what we are establishing in the intro and what we realized, there's no obvious answer. we can talk about the gun aspect, we can talk about domestic violence . this was an act of domestic violence killing her, but there was no pattern before of domestic violence . talk nfl head injuries , but we don't have a strong history of concussions here. columbine, everything that came out in the days after that ended up being wrong. do you see parallels here?

>> yes, i do. this case is refreshing. there's a lot of recent cases. we sort of allowed ourselves, collectively, the media and the country to be in a we don't know stage. some people have their ideas. it's nice that no single narrative emerged because in the past, particularly columbine with this, within the first week, we hit it soft. the whole country knew why it happened. two outcast loners who gone through the school on a rampage of revenge against the jocks because they were pullied. they were going to pay the jocks back. everybody understand that. most people are sure that's what happened. no singing one of those things is true. every single one of those is wrong. the problem is, we took bits of true information and constructed a narrative out of it and a motive out of it. if you consider, in this case, i hadn't heard all of those tapes and exchanges which are incredibly emotional, but i was thinking, as we saw little bits of text messages . in the last week or two of his life, he may have said a few thousand words or messages. if you transcribe it all and have pages and pages of what he said and pull up four lines from that randomly and try to -- that's all you saw and try to extrapolate, chances are you are wrong. you know, random bits would be wrong. that's what we go with. when that's all we have, we let ourselves believe that's a reasonable way of going about things. it's not. we come up with things.

>> yet, mike, there are some broader issues raised by what we do know about this. we have the text messages , the references to owning seven or eight guns. there is, a broader issue this raises at gun ownership in the nfl . tony dungy talked ant talking to his team and finding out 75% of them own guns. startled by that. can you talk a little bit about what we know about gun ownership in the nfl , why it's prevalent.

>> i will. context is important and conclusions are important. as much as we talk gun ownership , look at the concussion issue. we should not jump to conclusions but there's a higher rate of suicide. as much as we know it can reck the body, it can reck the mind. tony dungy would do that in the beginning telling the guys you have to register the guns. he was not bringing it up to dissuade them. you have a second amendment right to do that. professional football players, athletes but prevalent under football players. salaries are published. millionaires are walking around in america. how many have that thrust upon them? they don't grow up with wealth. there are lots of instances where players have been subject to robberies, home invasions . there's a huge gab between this feeling of i have to arm myself and what are the appropriate ways to do that. a lot of team security personnel dissuade the player from owning the guns. if they own guns, the only thing to do is the mind set of a football player who knows about violence and knows about the idea of protecting my house or the quarterback. it bleeds into the personal life . there's definitely a huge culture of gun ownership and also, another thing, you know, there's only four psychiatrists that the league uses or sorry, four team that is have psychologists on staff. the mental health aspect, who is supposed to take care of themselves gets lost in the job the professional athlete is going to go disrupt it.

>> there's a whole other question and it came up. i want to get into this about the propriety of discussions like this in the wake of the tragedy. we'll get