Steve Kerr Won’t Be Silent When It Comes to Gun Violence
Steve Kerr has served as head coach of the Golden State Warriors since 2014. His distinguished career includes leading his players to five National Basketball Association finals appearances over his first five seasons. Under his leadership, in 2015 the Warriors won their first NBA Championship in 40 years. For this feat, he was honored with the NBA’s 2016 Coach of the Year Award.
After May 24, 2022, though, the world also knows Steve Kerr for his courage off the basketball court.
Responding to tragedy with truth
That Tuesday, the small town of Uvalde, Texas, was riven by shock and horror as a teenage gunman brutally murdered 19 elementary school students and two of their teachers with an AR-style rifle. Uvalde now ranks as one of the worst mass killings in American history. The entire country, and people around the world, mourned with the families whose lives this depraved act destroyed.
“Any basketball questions don’t matter,” Kerr said behind the mic at a press conference that same night. Not even trying to hide his agitation and anger, he recounted the gun massacres the country had endured over a 10-day span: After naming the tragedy in Uvalde, Kerr went on to mention Buffalo, New York, where a gunman motivated by racist hatred killed 10 mostly elderly Black customers at a local grocery store and wounded three others. Just before that, there was a shooting at a Chinese-American church in Southern California, where another hate-filled shooter killed one person and wounded five others.
Kerr pounded the table, saying, “When are we gonna do something?”
His words were simple, direct, and deeply moving to anyone who still had a heart and a conscience. “I’m tired,” he said, of getting up at press conference after press conference to offer now-banal condolences and moments of silence to grieving families. “Enough!”
But Kerr didn’t stop there. He went on to do something few sports figures in today’s ultra-brand-protective climate have done: He called out the politicians behind the problem.
Calling out the powerful
Kerr referenced H.R. 8, a bill that passed the United States House of Representatives in 2021 but has since failed to even go as far as a vote in the Senate. H.R. 8, and the related H.R. 1446, both focus on requiring tighter regulation of gun sales and more thorough background checks before a sale. H.R. 8 would expand background check requirements to gun shows and private sales specifically.
The reason the Senate refused to hold a vote, Kerr went on, is simply “to hold onto power.” Kerr addressed Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) and other senators by name for their refusal to act. He asked them if they were really going to place their need for power “ahead of the lives of our children.” Not only children but “our elderly and our churchgoers” have their lives in the hands of 50 Republican senators in Washington.
Kerr asked everyone watching to stop and think about their own children and grandchildren, siblings and parents, and other loved ones. He asked them how they would feel if what happened that day in Uvalde had happened to them.
“We can’t get numb to this,” he said with finality, turning bitterly sarcastic as he mentioned the typical reaction cycle of reading about such tragedies, such as having “a moment of silence” and turning back to sports with a “Come on, Mavs, let’s go!”
Kerr drove home his point by referring to recent polls showing that about 90 percent of the American people want background checks for gun purchases. After reiterating his point about senators whose only goal was to hold onto power, he jumped up and abruptly left the podium, saying, “I’m fed up.”
A personal stake in protecting people
Plenty of pundits and analysts thought what Kerr did was a breath of fresh air. So did gun control advocates. “Thank you, Steve Kerr,” tweeted Fred Guttenberg, whose 14-year-old daughter Jamie died in the Parkland, Florida high school mass shooting in 2018. In memory of his daughter and all the other victims, Guttenberg tweeted, “WE ARE GOING TO DO THIS!”
An increasing number of corporations, nonprofits, and sports teams are finding that their key stakeholders want and expect them to speak out on the serious issues we all face today. Certainly, the young adults who make up Gen Z want the organizations they support to take public stands on values important to them.
One reason this message is so powerful coming from Kerr is that he’s not in politics. But he’s not someone who has only lived in the world of sports. Kerr was born in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1965. His father, Malcolm Kerr, served as president of the American University there before being shot and killed by Islamic extremists in 1984. One of the very few times Steve Kerr has talked about his father’s assassination publicly was in 2016, when he detailed to The New York Times how that tragedy had impacted his life.
So when Kerr got emotional at the press conference on May 24, he was probably holding back a lot of rage about failed systems and do-nothing authorities, a rage anyone watching the news over the past few years has felt.
Unfortunately, 60 senators will need to vote for the gun control legislation before it can go to the president’s desk. With the Senate divided 50-50 along party lines, even getting a few Republican senators to vote “yes” won’t be enough. Kerr is right: There’s too much money from gun lobbyists going into too many senators’ pockets.
But if anything is going to move the US to the next level on sensible, life-saving gun control measures, it’s the kind of common sense, plain-speaking, and raw passion we saw from Steve Kerr.