One can trust that millions of people were moved by Steve Kerr’s recent pre-game presser in which he lambasted conservative politicians for not doing more about gun control in light of the the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
Yet Kerr’s comments, and those like them, are a problem.
There’s a lot of heart to what Kerr is saying. We know of his own personal tragedy and we can all agree that this shooting is a tragedy that tears mightily at our national fabric.
But for all its virality, Kerr’s diatribe is incoherent and borders on disingenuous.
Pounding his fist on the table, Kerr raged at the “50 Senators” (that’s code for Republicans) who haven’t voted on HR8, a bill that would expand background checks to be required on all firearm sales.
“There’s a reason they won’t vote on it—to hold onto power,” he said. “Are you going to put your own desire for power ahead of the lives of our children, and our elderly and our church goers, because that’s what it looks like. It’s what we do every week.”
Never mind that we don’t mourn mass shootings weekly. Or that suicides, not mass shootings, are the main cause of gun deaths. Or that many elderly and church goers support gun rights. Or that handguns, not assault weapons, make up the vast majority of firearm murders.
But Kerr conceiving that the only reason a Republican senator might object to the bill in question as a grab on power is cynicism plain and simple.
A note to Kerr: Many lawmakers vote against gun control legislation on sound moral and ethical grounds.[1]One could also consider why a supporter of Second Amendment rights would permanently forfeit any of those based on the current climate and its trends, not to mention a lack of clear-cut causality. Imagine that! But to know this you have to spend less time railing and more time considering.
We are a nation in pain. But the pain of this country goes well beyond guns and the shootings that make the headlines. The pain is deeper and involves what the White House itself calls a national mental health crisis. And this in turn involves an epidemic of alienation that we can find too easily in each of our communities, from L.A. to Lubbock.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott pointed out that 18-year-olds have been able to buy rifles in Texas for more than 60 years. “Why is it,” he asked, “that the majority of those 60 years we did not have school shootings and we do now? The reality is I do not know the answer to that question.”
Steve Kerr somehow thinks he does.
One should be outraged by the tragedy in Uvalde. But outrage shouldn’t inform our lawmaking. We have a very serious problem on our hands, and we’ll need our most reasoned minds to solve it.
Notes, etc.
| ↑1 | One could also consider why a supporter of Second Amendment rights would permanently forfeit any of those based on the current climate and its trends, not to mention a lack of clear-cut causality. |
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