NBA coach Steve Kerr plays the statesman, while politicians sound like dumb jocks

Don’t go numb; don’t give up hope.

There are few conclusions to draw from the mass shootings at an elementary school, a church and a grocery store, but we have smart people from unlikely walks of life asking pointed questions and challenging those in power to take bold and swift action.

It’s clear we have the will to do something; it’s also clear we have plenty to do.

A basketball coach, Steve Kerr, refused to discuss his sport before a big game on Tuesday night.

“In the last 10 days, we’ve had elderly Black people killed in a supermarket in Buffalo. We’ve had Asian churchgoers killed in Southern California. And now we have children murdered at school,” Kerr said.

Kerr slapped the desk he was leaning on.

“When are we gonna do something?!” he shouted.

Kerr was heavily influenced by his dad's death

What he said next would shock people who don’t know his background, but Kerr’s impact has always been bigger than basketball.

As longtime Washington Post sportswriter John Feinstein detailed in “One on One: Behind the Scenes with the Greats in the Game” in 1984, Kerr’s father “was president of the American University in Beirut. Steve actually spent a lot of his boyhood in the Middle East. Last January, his dad was assassinated.”

Feinstein continued, relaying a conversation with Butch Henry, the sports information director at the University of Arizona, where Kerr played: “Two days after Steve’s dad was killed, we played Arizona State. There was a moment of silence before the game. Steve played because his mom told him there was nothing his dad enjoyed more than watching him play. He came into the game six or seven minutes in, and the first time he touched the ball he had an open 3 … Drained it. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house.”

The story was recounted in “The Last Dance,” a 2020 documentary series on the career of Kerr’s most famous teammate, Michael Jordan.

“I used to think about it all the time when I was playing,” Kerr said of his father’s death. “During the national anthem, I would always think about my dad and think, ‘He would love this right now.’ ”

He made a pointed critique, with facts and solutions

This is the context in which Kerr challenged every Republican in the U.S. Senate.

“I’m tired,” Kerr said. “I’m so tired of getting up here and offering condolences to the devastated families that are out there … Enough! There’s 50 senators, right now, who refuse to vote on HR 8, which is a background check rule that the House passed a couple years ago. It’s been sitting there for two years.

“And there’s a reason they won’t vote on it: to hold on to power.”

Kerr then made clear exactly whom he was criticizing.

“I ask you, (Senate Minority Leader) Mitch McConnell; I ask all of you senators who refuse to do anything about the violence and school shootings and supermarket shootings, I ask you: Are you going to put your own desire for power ahead of the lives of our children and our elderly and our churchgoers?”

He didn’t stop there.

“Do you realize that 90 percent of Americans, regardless of political party, want universal background checks?” he asked. “Ninety percent of us!”

PolitiFact, a division of journalism think tank The Poynter Institute verified the 90% support rate in 2021.

Barkley asked similarly intelligent questions

Not to be outdone, Charles Barkley, who played professionally in Phoenix before his current career mixing antics and analysis in the context of basketball, asked the kinds of questions that we all should be grappling with.

“What is making young kids do this stuff?” Barkley asked on TNT NBA Tip-Off.

The accused shooters in Buffalo, N.Y., and Uvalde, Texas, were each 18.

“What is happening in your life at 17 or 18 years old that makes you so angry that you react like this?” Barkley asked.

He then called for an end to the partisan gridlock in Congress, decrying “this notion that every single thing that happens in the world, we have to vote along party lines, no matter what the subject is. … You’re supposed to represent ALL the people.”

Meanwhile, in Arizona, U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar was on Twitter baselessly suggesting that the Texas gunman was “a transsexual leftist illegal alien.”

It’s striking that couple of former basketball players sound like statesmen when a congressman sounds like a dumb jock.

Dig deeper: Arizona Supreme Court won't remove Gosar from ballot

Author and journalist Malcolm Gladwell offered something of an answer to Barkley’s question in a 2015 essay for The New Yorker, leaning on research from a Stanford sociologist in comparing the attacks to a long-simmering riot because “a riot is a case of destructive violence that involves a great number of otherwise quite normal people who would not usually be disposed to violence.”

Gladwell reached a chilling conclusion: “The problem is not that there is an endless supply of deeply disturbed young men who are willing to contemplate horrific acts. It’s worse. It’s that young men no longer need to be deeply disturbed to contemplate horrific acts.”

It proves that anyone can be part of the solution

Don’t go numb; don’t give up hope.

Kerr and Barkley are challenging elected officials, showing that any of us could do the same. McConnell and Gosar need to reflect the wishes of their constituents or prepare for efforts to vote them out.

Gladwell has illustrated the scope of the problem. We know, at this point, that anyone could be a mass shooter. That means more money and brainpower should go into prevention programs that focus on mental health, empathy and compassion.

Second Amendment advocates can push for more armed guards at mass gatherings.

The gun control crowd might organize buyback programs similar to those run around Martin Luther King Day nearly 30 years ago, when weapons could be exchanged for cash or tickets to sporting events, including the Super Bowl.

Of course, none of these solutions will bring an immediate end to mass shootings, but the problem took decades to reach this level.

Finally, it’s clear that we have the will to do something; it’s clear there’s plenty to do – the solutions can come from people in unlikely walks of life.

Reach Moore at gmoore@azcentral.com or 602-444-2236. Follow him on Instagram and Twitter @SayingMoore.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Steve Kerr plays the statesman while Rep. Gosar plays the dumb jock