Leave it to master baiter Sean Hannity to turn a segment about Bob Costas’ gun control-favoring comments in the wake of the Jovan Belcher murder/suicide into one on race. The producers’ choice of guests – African American Leo Terrell, a civil rights attorney, and Erik Rush, one of Hannity’s regularly designated African-American black attackers – strongly suggested a desire to use this segment to play the race card. And, in a typical Hannity maneuver, outsource the racial attacks. Sure enough, that’s exactly what happened, although there was so much shouting, it became hard to make out who was saying what.

Hannity’s opening question set the stage for racial conflict. He deliberately took a swipe at Terrell by bringing up the irrelevant information, “You’re friends with O.J. Simpson.” Nice way to suggest that Terrell is overly sympathetic to African American crooks!

Terrell said he anticipated Hannity would use the Simpson case and, as any savvy Fox News liberal should do, took control right away of the discussion. Or at least as best he could. “Gun control is an issue where guns are in the hands of people in the urban community and guns are being used to kill people,” Terrell said.

Hilariously, Hannity continued focusing on the Simpson case, as if that case were emblematic of American violence or African American violence.

By the way, here was another instance of Hannity name-dropping as he boasted about having “friends that are in the NFL” who tell him that “the majority of players are taking serious drugs because of the injuries they are sustaining on a regular basis.” In other words, he had his elitist hat on, not the “regular guy” hat that he wears when he mocks others as elitists.

Rush began by making it clear he was going to smear the left and its African American members rather than argue against Costas or gun control. He said it’s “obvious” that “that stuff” is not good for the players and that “the investigation is in its infancy” before moving on to what he surely knew was his Fox News role: “My point here is that whenever there’s a high-profile gun crime, the fear mongering begins, the histrionics begin, and all of this stuff really has its genesis in the political left… who want to disarm the public.”

Terrell jumped in to say, “That is an absolute lie!” He repeatedly demanded that someone show him "one piece of legislation" from the Obama administration to back up that accusation. 

The shouting match was on.

Rush then got to his black attacking:

It’s particularly irksome to me to see a black man come out for all this gun control with (a) specious argument, when the reason that we have all of this gun crime in urban areas… is because of 60 years of Democrat(ic) (policies).

It devolved from there, with Rush yelling, “Why don’t you shut up! Will you please shut up? Just shut up!" 

Terrell was not about to back down but in my view, he did not help his case by hurling insults such as, "You are an embarrassment!" and saying that Rush should be the one to shut up.

Hannity wound up stepping in to stop the yelling. But not before Rush made this racial swipe:

…60 years of policies of the Democrats that have destroyed the black family, that have engendered dysfunction, and you’ve got these overseers like Mr. Terrell here who’s perpetuating it.