For their first visit to the White House since 2016, the Golden State Warriors had much more important things in mind than just celebrating their most recent championship. Steve Kerr and other members of the defending champions participated in a roundtable discussion on preventing gun violence with high-ranking officials in the Joe Biden administration because they were given the opportunity to spend a significant amount of time conferring with the President of the United States.
Before the official ceremony commemorating the Warriors’ 2022 championship, Kerr, Klay Thompson and Moses Moody met for 45 minutes in the White House’s Map Room with three administration officials and James Cadogan of the NBA’s Social Justice Coalition to discuss America’s gun violence crisis. The White House initially conceived of the roundtable, with Golden State eagerly accepting—no surprise given the notably aggressive crusade for gun safety Kerr has been on since last spring.
“We had had all these moments of silence at games, like five of them in one season,” he recently told Howard Beck of Sports Illustrated. “It was insane. A moment of silence for the Pulse nightclub, a moment of silence for this, for that, one after another. And it’s like, ‘This is all we can do? Is just have a moment of silence?’ I mean, it’s the right thing to do. But that’s all? Like, how about doing something? And that’s when I really started to become more active.”
Those sentiments echo the impassioned speech Kerr made on May 24th, before his team’s playoff game against the Dallas Mavericks, following gun massacres in Buffalo, NY and Uvalde, TX that left 10 Black people and 19 school children dead. His comments quickly went viral, positioning Kerr and the Warriors as proud, public-facing advocates for gun safety measures.
Kerr, remember, is uniquely suited to addressing the perils of gun violence. His father, Malcolm, was assassinated by members of the militant group Islamic Jihad on January 18th, 1984, targeted because he was president of the American University of Beirut in Lebanon.
Nearly 40 years and hundreds of mass shootings on American soil later, Kerr is optimistic about his country’s evolving response to gun control efforts, inspired by efforts of the younger generation.
“I believe in the young generation,” he says. “The March for Our Lives kids are so inspiring. And it might take another 30 years to just get the next generation in office, 20 years, to [vote out] all these kooks who are going to support semiautomatic weapons of mass murder over the possibility of losing their political career. Maybe the next generation will be filled with people who actually have a conscience. And I think that’s going to happen.”
Less than a week after Golden State’s roundtable on gun violence and Kerr’s remarks to Sports Illustrated, the terrors of random gun violence hit especially close to home for the Warriors: 11 people were murdered in a mass shooting in Southern California’s Monterey Park on January 21st, and seven more lost their lives two days later during a massacre in Half Moon Bay, some 40 minutes south of Chase Center.
Source: https://clutchpoints.com
